Formula One’s Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur has his shiny new contract now signed which has alleviated some of the pressure from the Italian media who were questioning the leadership of the Frenchman. Further, Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc also have watertight deals which will see them as team mates for the Scuderia in 2026, so what could possibly be going wring in Maranello?

According to Vasseur, all is going to plan. He persistently reminds the F1 paddock media that Ferrari are having a successful season because they lie ‘best of the rest’ behind a dominant m McLaren team whose MCL39 car is the class of the field.

Yet the reality is F1’s most iconic team are a shocking 299 omits behind the papaya liveried outfit which on average is a 21 point deficit for each of the fourteen weekends of racing completed this season. Yet Ferrari are still second best, right?

 

 

 

Ferrari should be way ahead of Mercedes

This is a plausible line to take but fails to account for the fact that both Red Bull Racing and Mercedes are like a bird with just one wing as their second seat drivers are delivering disappointing results week in and out. By way of contrast, Ferrari are scoring points consistently with Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc finishing outside the points once each and both drivers also failed to score in China due to the team failing to ensure their cars were technically legal.

Mercedes by way of contrast have four retirements along with four non-scoring Grand Prix and Red Bull Racing have three retirements together with nine non-points finishes, mostly associated with the second seat now occupied by Yuki Tsunoda. So by all rights, Ferrari should be clear favourites to be in second place this year, but yet sit just 24 points ahead of the silver arrows.

Ferrari should be much further ahead if Lewis Hamilton was pulling his weight. The seven times world champion has just over 70% of the points that his team mate has scored, which is down on the 91% he scored in his final year at Mercedes. Even in 2022 which was Hamilton’s worst contribution to the Brackley team’s total whilst partnering Russell, his contribution was 87% of his team mates final tally and this is where Ferrari are clearly failing. Hamilton enduring his worst start to a season and without a single podium to date has bee just enough to keep Ferrari in second place, but far less than was hoped when he signed for the team.

Joining a new team is never easy, as Carlos Sainz is testament to. Sainz was wining races last season at Ferrari, even coming back in less than 14 days from an appendix operation to claim victory in Melbourne. Now the talented Spaniard has just 16 points to his name, some 29% of the total scored by his team mate Alex Albon.

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Hamilton meltdown ‘calculated’

It could be said that Lewis Hamilton is taking the criticism levelled against him on the chin, with him admitting to being “useless” in Hungary and suggesting Ferrari should “change the driver.” What is generally missed when reporting the seven times world champion’s  comments made in Budapest is a well honed theme he has been making when was asked if he could explain to the viewers why he felt the way he did, Hamilton added: “Not particularly….when you have a feeling, you have a feeling….. there’s a lot going on in the background that is not great.”

Following Lewis’ difficult weekend at the Hungaroring, Ferrari grandee Arturo Merzario claims Hamilton has been “destroyed” by the team and that close associates inside the Scuderia have confirmed to him they never wanted the ex-Mercedes driver to join the team. “Ninety per cent of Ferrari insiders disagreed, at least from what I understand. And then, when a driver doesn’t feel valued or an integral part of the team’s pursuit of a goal, he loses motivation,” said the former Maranello driver.

Whilst there’s no way of verifying this claim, it sits with the repeated Hamilton narrative that ‘there’s a lot going on in the background that’s not great.’ Not everyone was convinced by Lewis’ apparent meltdown in Hungary as RTL pundit Christian Danner now offers a more cynical perspective. He believes Hamilton’s emotional outburst was designed as a calculated manoeuvre to apply pressure to the team.

His line of thinking is that so ridiculous were the claims made by Ferrari’s new driver and that with seven world titles the description of being “useless” was a kind of reverse psychology. This was born out by various paddock presenters, who each questioned the fact that Hamilton was indeed as he described.

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Scuderia’s dysfunctional culture

The conclusion, if Hamilton is not the problem, it must be the team where “there’s a lot going on in the background and its not great.” In light of Merzario;s revelation about the Maranello engineers rejecting their new driver, Danner believes Lewis’ comments were a signal to them that he should not be underestimated. “To show those at Ferrari: if you think I don’t know what’s going on, then you’ll be surprised,” Danner explains.

The RTL presenter returns to the fact that more in Maranello is low. “There is no good mood, no good atmosphere and no good prospects for the future,” adding he did not believes Hamilton is considering an exit from Ferrari in the near future.

Hamilton’s dishonesty is a result of the dysfunctional culture within the Ferrari team, as was exemplified by Charles Leclerc in his post race interviews in Budapest. He called out the team over the radio for interfering with his car during the final pit stop, rather than letting him driver around the problem.

The problem being the car was running too low to the ground and risked being disqualified after the chequered flag as happened to Lewis Hamilton in China. Leclerc’s radio message made it plain the issue had been discussed before the race, but fumed at the fact the team had not consulted him before increasing tyre pressures and reducing front wing downforce to raise the car for its final stint.

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Ferrari president calls for unity

Leclerc claimed after the race that he was mistaken and the reason he was a second off his previous lap times despite the car being much lighter on fuel, was due to a problem with the chassis. Yet when an F1 driver has a broken chassis or bodywork, their engineers rail them with the details including the number of points of downforce lost. Ferrari never did this.

The dishonesty at Ferrari is a cultural problem and is used to deflect attention from the issues within the racing organisation. Had Ferrari admitted there were concerns over a possible disqualification for Leclerc’s car running an illegal ride height, the Italian media would been frenzied in their collective criticism of the team.

All this demonstrates why Ferrari are not winning titles. As Ferrari group president John Elkann reflected in Budapest, “we all remember when we were victorious, and we were victorious because there was a very strong sense that incredible individuals – from our engineers, our mechanics, our pilots, our team principal – were really individuals that worked together.”

The fact that Elkann is making such a comparison which is clearly not where Ferrari are at present is evidence the trouble in Maranello has even reached the ears of the upper echelons within the team. Hamilton’s outburst was clearly to attract attention to the current situation and to that end, it achieved its’ rather dishonest intention. 

 

 

 

 

MORE F1 NEWS – In the fight against Piastri, “Norris shows a mental shift”

For much of the first half of the 2025 Formula One season, the McLaren garage has been the scene of a polite but increasingly pointed civil war. On one side, the cool-headed, data-loving Oscar Piastri, who treats the championship like a mathematical equation he is patiently solving. On the other, Lando Norris, the mercurial Brit with a tendency to light up a race one week and set it on fire (metaphorically and occasionally literally) the next.

At times, it looked as though Norris’s title challenge would fade before it truly began. Piastri’s clean weekends and error-free consistency contrasted sharply with Norris’s occasional lapses — those small but costly mistakes that seem harmless in the moment yet pile up like unclaimed baggage at Heathrow. Against the backdrop of a mentally unshakable Australian, some feared Norris’s more emotive style would crumble under sustained pressure.

And yet, as the circus rolled into Hungary, the narrative shifted. Norris had already taken commanding wins in Austria and at his home Grand Prix at Silverstone. Piastri replied with victory in Belgium, but Norris came straight back in Budapest. That win came despite a sluggish getaway that dropped him from third to fifth in the opening laps — proof, perhaps, that the Norris of mid-season 2025 is made of sterner stuff. As the dust settled on the Hungaroring, he found himself just nine points behind his team-mate heading into the summer break…. READ MORE