Coming into the 2025 season, Ferrari were expected to have built upon the success they had towards the end of last year. The Scuderia had the quickest car over the final six race weekends of 2024, closing an almost 100 point gap to McLaren to just 14 come the chequered flag in Abu Dhabi.
Yet the team decided revolution, not evolution, would be the strategy for this yea’s F1 challenger and the evidence to date is that Ferrari have failed on their mission.
In Australia Leclerc and Hamilton were just slow, qualifying 7th and 8th respectively and finishing in 8th and 10th come the end of the weekend. Sprint qualifying in China proved to be a different matter with Hamilton claiming pole and then winning the race on Saturday morning.
Hamilton challenged over Ferrari ride height
Yet come Saturday afternoon in Grand Prix qualifying and once Ferrari appeared to have lost all of its pace. Hamilton admitted the team had made changes since the Sprint but was unsure of how successful they would be on Sunday.
Come the Grand Prix in Shanghai, Leclerc tangled with Hamilton into the first corner, leaving the front wing endplate missing from his car for the remainder of the race. While Lewis’ car suffered no damage, his pace was average in the race despite stopping twice for fresh rubber.
Prior to it being announced both He and Leclerc had been disqualified by the race stewards, Hamilton gave a revealing interview to Sky Italia in the media pen. He was asked whether it was more difficult to raise the ride height on the SF-25 than for other teams, a question he tried to duck but instead his body language gave away tell tale signs that the topic was a sensitive one within the team.
When it was put to him the SF-25 was more difficult “to raise” than the rest of the field, Hamilton sand bagged asking: “Who said that? I don’t know… who said that we lifted the car…” the immediate impression was the Italian reporter had stumbled across a hot potato in the camp of the Scuderia.
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Lewis’ contradicts himself
Lewis then contradicted himself stating first that the ride height had not been adjusted by the team, before admitting it was in fact one of the changes made after the Sprint.
“No… [we didn’t change the ride height] we made some other changes mostly – as well as that [adjusting ride height] – but not massively just small amounts, but all the pieces put together made it quite a bit worse,” added Hamilton who appeared under pressure to say the right thing.
Lewis went on to throw Ferrari under the bus for the setup changes made for Grand Prix qualifying, claiming it was something he had never tried before. “Charles tested something in Bahrain, I hadn’t tested it, but we both went that way [with the new setup] and it was bad. I know not to do that again,” he concluded with a wry smile.
Clearly the excessive wear on Hamilton’s underfloor ‘plank’ which was discovered later indicated there was a problem with ride height at Ferrari. Yet Charles Leclerc’s ‘plank’ was fine, although his car was underweight. The arty line from Ferrari was that Hamilton having two stopped had pushed harder throughout the Grand Prix whilst Leclerc on a one stop wouldn’t then suffer the incremental wear under the floor.
Sprint weekends see big ride height adjustments
The last disqualifications for ride height transgressions came at the USGP in Austin, 2023. Again this was a Sprint weekend which drives the F1 engineers to run different run programmes than at a standard weekend with three practice sessions.
At one third of the distance of a Grand Prix, the Sprint requires just a third of the 100kg of fuel required on Sundays. With less weight, the teams can adjust the ride height accordingly, remembering the lower the faster these modern F1 ground effect cars go.
For the Grand Prix the height needs to be raised to cope with the additional weight of the fuel, so the Sky Italia question now becomes more pertinent. Do Ferrari struggle with raising their car more than other teams?
In fact the reality to Ferrari’s difficulties may be subtly different as the evidence was in Australia they were just not on the front runners pace. Albert Park, Melbourne is a bumpy circuit and all the teams ran their cars higher than in Shanghai to mitigate this circuit specific issue.
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SF25 aero platform “too peaky”
With Hamilton winning the Sprint all looked good for the Scuderia on the smooth and super grippy new surface in Shanghai. Come the race and it was a different story following the car being raised for the extra fuel load.
Bernie Collins, ex-engineer for McLaren and Aston Martin wonders whether the SF-25’s issues are related to “peaky ride height.” which she explains to Sky Sports, “means there’s a very small optimum ride height that you can have a good aerodynamic platform in, that is an issue for a car.
“You want to be fit to run a range of ride heights because of all these range of tracks. For example, in Austria there are intense kerbs so you want to add a bit of ride height there. Maybe the aero platform is too peaky,” Collins concludes.
Of course with just two sets of the hard tyre issued to the teams on a Sprint weekend, nobody had run the compound before Sunday. The hard tyres were saved for what was expected to be an attritional race, in terms of tyre wear, and so everyone was in the dark over how much the tyres would wear during the Grand Prix.
Italian media report fix for Japan
The result was more wear for the one stopping Charles Leclerc which led to his car being underweight. Hamilton with fresher rubber at the chequered flag, made the weight limit but his extra speed across the 57 laps saw his Ferrari taking bigger hits as it bottomed out.
The tell tale signs this is an issue Ferrari were already aware of is the fact they are bringing a new floor to the next race in Japan, which may reduce the peakiness in the SF25 and thus reduce the sensitivity to ride height.
Today La Gazette’s F1 technical writer, Paolo Filisetti reports: “The [Ferrari] project is still immature, but there is potential. Developments are planned for the floor to better manage the ride heights.”
Hamilton was indeed aware of the Ferrari ride height issues and was caught unawares that the information had become public knowledge in his Sky Italia interview.
Honda now key to scrapping 2026 engines
Vasseur’s distraction technique
The double disqualification of the Ferrari cars in Shanghai has left the team with just 17 points, while McLaren who lead the championship after two weekends have 78. The ruling from the stewards in China sucked in all the media bandwidth while masking another Ferrari issue which must be addressed.
Hamilton and Leclerc have come together in both the first two race weekends of the year, without significant consequences so far, but this is something team boss Fred Vasseur needs to get across before more serious outcomes that could lie ahead.
Yet the Frenchman turned his angst against FOM TV instead, describing the sequencing of Hamilton’s radio messages broadcast, “a joke.” With Hamilton ahead of Leclerc in the first stint, he radioed the team to offer to allow his team mate through given he appeared to have more pace than Lewis.
This message was not broadcast by FOM. However, they did broadcast messages from Hamilton’s engineer telling him to move aside, something Lewis then responded to with displeasure. Hamilton repeated he would do so when he saw fit and the impression was created he was in dispute with team orders.
FOM never broadcast the entire conversations the drivers and teams are having during the race. They are selective in the messages they chose for the viewers to hear, something Vasseur knows all too well. By firing off a salvo across the bows of FOM, maybe Fred was merely seeking to distract from his teams appealing performance for most of the weekend in China.
Red Bull chaos as Lawson decision creates division
If Formula One’s mercurial Dr. Helmut Marko is to be believed, Liam Lawson is already the walking dead. The 82 year old Austrian’s pet media outlet, F1-insider, has reported that Lawson will be sacked by Red Bull following a big pow wow in Milton Keynes this week.
The problem though for Red Bull runs deeper than who is Max’s team mate and the rights and wrong’s of dismissing Lawson are highly complex. There have been historical accusations that Red Bull Racing build their Formula One cars to suit Max’s driving style and that his team mate’s can’t cope with the skittish behaviour of the resulting designs.
But in all probability this is not the case as both Christian Horner and ex-Red Bull tech guru Adrian Newey have insisted in times past, they design the faster car and the drivers have to learn how to handle them best…. READ MORE
With over 30 years of experience in Formula 1 as an insider journalist, I have built trusted connections across the paddock, from race engineers and mechanics to senior team figures. At The Judge 13, I and a handful of trusted colleagues share exclusive Formula 1 news, expert analysis and behind-the-scenes stories you will not find in mainstream motorsport media.
