Last Updated on April 3 2025, 12:35 pm

The double disqualification of the Ferrari drivers from the Formula One Chinese Grand Prix, came as a huge shock to the paddock. For an F1 team to have one car disqualified for technical reasons is rare, but never in Ferrari’s F1 history have they had two cars thrown out of the final classification, truly a low point for the iconic team

The team did not fight the decision of the stewards in China issuing a statement which said: “Following the FIA post-race scrutineering both our cars were found not to conform to the regulations for different reasons…. we will learn from what happened today and make sure we don’t make the same mistakes again.”

Of course the blame game in the Italian media was instantaneous and brutal. “Chaos,” “a disaster” and “an embarrassment” screamed the back page headlines in Italy with some suggesting that Hamilton had already lost faith in his new team after just two race weekends.

 

 

 

Ferrari claimed tyre wear the problem

The team blamed the one stop strategy for Leclerc for excessive tyre wear they didn’t expect as a knee jerk explanation to what had gone wrong. Yet Leclerc’s strategy was adopted by the majority of the drivers in China, with only Pierre Gasly being also underweight.

Pirelli’s inspection of Leclerc’s tyres back at base in Milan have also shown no significant discrepancy between the wear from the Ferrari and others who completed a similar distance on the hard tyre and now an additional explanation is being offered from the Scuderia, relating to problems with the Monegasque driver’s water bottle.

The previous weekend in Melbourne and entertaining exchange took place between Leclerc and his race engineer Bryan Bozzi. “Is there a leakage?” Asked the driver to which Bozzi replied: “A leakage where?”

“I have the seat full of water,” Leclerc informs his engineer only to receive the comical response from Bozzi: “Must be the water.” Leclerc concludes the exchange humorously saying “Let’s add that to the words of wisdom.”

RB21 design: The “opposite” off Newey’s recommendation

 

 

 

Now the water bottle is partly to blame

Yet the problem was not an isolated incident as again in Shanghai the team believe a loss of water from the bottle contributed to the car being 1kg underweight. 1 litre of water weights 1kg and the drivers rarely drink all the water resrves available during a Grand Prix.

Speaking to French newspaper L’Equipe, Ferrari’s team principal said: “It’s not just that. The tyres are only part of the explanation. We also lost a litre of water with Charles’s drinking [bottle] leaking. The loss of weight is always an addition of many small factors.”

Even with a fully worn set of tyres, the drivers spend the cool down lap after the chequered flag picking up ‘marbles’ of discarded rubber  to increase the weight of the cars. But all the teams do this and factor this into their final weight calculations when deciding on how much blast to put into the car.

Fred Vasseur went on to give a strange explanation for the disqualification of both Ferrari’s in China for different reasons. Whilst Leclerc’s car was 1kg under the minimum 8000kg required, Lewis Hamilton had excessive wear on the underfloor skid plank resulting in it being measured around 0.5mm beneath the FIA tolerance mandated.

Marko backs Pérez F1 return

 

 

 

Ferrari boss says no “cheating” intended

“You have to distinguish between disqualification because you’re taking risks and disqualification because someone is cheating,” said Vasseur. “The aim of the game in F1 is to push yourself to the limit of all parameters, everywhere… to get to the last gramme of weight, to get to the last tenth of a millimetre of the skid, to get to the last millimetre of wing deformation.

“So it’s certain that the more pressure you’re under, the more intense the fight, the closer you need to get to these limits and the more risks you take.”

And of course in F1 the margins are fine and others have been disqualified in recent times for similar errors of judgement. George Russell was to forfeit his win in Belgium last year for his Mercedes being under weight and Hamilton and Leclerc were thrown out of the 2023 USGP for excessive plank wear. Some reports in the interim have suggested Lewis Hamilton has lost faith in his new team, who are famed for their glaring mistakes. Yet the seven times champion denied this in Suzuka, stating he was impressed with the thoroughness with which Ferrari have investigated the mistakes.

“We’ve gone through everything – I was at the factory on Wednesday – and [there are] lots of learnings,” he said. “We take the highs and lows together as a team and obviously it’s not what everyone’s worked hard to have happen on a race weekend. No team – no engineer, no mechanic – puts all the effort in for something like that.

“But I’d say the most impressive thing is how the team have taken it and how they’ve worked, how they’ve churned through the data, how we progress from here. That is the most important.”

Marko discusses Verstappen’s Red Bull exit

 

 

 

Hamilton rejects ‘loss of faith’ claims

Of course all Formula One teams work to the finest of margins and even Alpine made a similar mistake with Gasly’s car being underweight in Shanghai. Yet the failure to get it right at Ferrari demonstrates the team are operating on the very limit in their mission to hang on to the coat tails of the likes of McLaren and indeed the margins get finer ad the risks bigger when on the back foot.

“I have absolute 100% faith in this team,” stated Hamilton. “There was obviously a huge amount of hype at the beginning of the year, and I don’t know if everyone was expecting us to be winning from race one and winning the championship in the first year. That wasn’t my expectation.

“I know that I’m coming into a new culture, a new team, it’s going to take time. I’ve spent the past two months just observing how the team works in comparison to the other two teams that I’ve worked at and through this past week, I’ve been able to make notes and create pointers of areas I feel like we can improve on.

“And that will continue through the year as we learn more and more about each other.”

Marko sacking

 

 

 

F1 cars are not water tight

Leclerc too was supportive of the team’s decision to push to the very last ounce of blast. “Everybody plays with the limit and tries to be as close as possible to it,” he said. “But to have both cars underneath it was a big pain. We didn’t need that.

“It’s been a very difficult first part of the season. The first two races were difficult, the pace was not where we expected it to be, and to lose even more points than we already did with that, it hurts the team a lot.

“I’m confident we’ve learned from it. Whenever these kind of events happen, we try to understand and analyse what went wrong and change a little bit the process. It was a multitude of things adding up, and the margin we took wasn’t big enough.”

There was some suggestion that the Ferrari explanation of the water bottle was smoke and mirrors based on the assumption the FIA tested ‘tubs’ were watertight. However this is not true and there are a myriad of tiny drain holes and overflow outlets which prevent the pooling of water in an F1 car. Otherwise in the rain, the car would slowly fill with water.

“I didn’t see it coming”: Lawson opens up over sacking

 

 

 

 

Dr. Marko mysteriously “ghosts” Yuki Tsunoda

The Red Bull Racing saga rolled on and into Japan this week as the fallout out from the team’s earliest ever sacking of a driver continues. Since the news broke that Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda were being switched between the two Red Bull owned Formula One teams, Dr. Marko has been on a frenzied tour of the European F1 media excusing and explaining the alleged reasoning behind the team’s decisions over their driver line up.

Christian Horner by way of contrast has kept his counsel on the matter, issuing a short statement on the day of the announcement but nothing since. Marko claimed the decision to promote Lawson alongside Verstappen made last December was a “unanimous” collective “mistake” which contradicts the comments made at the time by the team principal.

“It was a very split decision and Yuki certainly impressed the team when he tested in Abu Dhabi,” Horner revealed at the team’s announcement that Lawson would be replacing Sergio Perez…. READ MORE