Ferrari, oh my dear Ferrari. The once mighty force in Formula One is crawling towards the finishing line in Abu Dhabi to conclude what appears to be a winless season across the 24 Grand Prix.

Granted, the race at the highly controversial Losail circuit was in improvement on the double DNF in Brazil, yet the pace of the SF-25 placed the Scuderia firmly in the midfield. Lewis Hamilton failed to get out of SQ1 and and Q1 for the race on Sunday and for the fifth time this season he remarkably again failed to score points in the Grand Prix.

Hamilton since the mid-point of the season at the British Grand Prix has scored just 49 points whilst his team mate has battled with the 2025 Ferrari creation and racked up more than double the score of Hamilton with 111 points.

 

 

 

Vasseur blames Pirelli

Finishing ahead of Lewis were all the drivers from the top four teams – including Yuki Tsunoda – together with both Williams cars, the Racing Bull of Liam Lawson and the Aston Martin of Fernando Alonso. Charles Leclerc who benefitted from the chaos in the pit lane on lap 7 was placed eight, but almost a minute behind the winner Max Verstappen.

In just three race weekends the Scuderia have slipped from second in the constructors’ title race to fourth and the mathematics now dooms them to remain in this position at the final end of season classification.

Team principal, Fred Vasseur appeared to not know whether to laugh or cry over the team’s lack lustre weekend but was keen to pinpoint the source of Ferrari’s struggles on Pirelli.

“As a team we have to try to understand what we did wrong this weekend,” said the Frenchman. “From my understanding so far it’s linked to the tyre pressure, the prescription, that we were a bit like on a balloon all weekend and we struggled to deal with, but it’s the same for everybody, it means that we did a worse job than the others.”

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More trouble at the Qatar GP

The four Grand Prix weekends in Losail since the Qatar Grand Prix was welcomed onto the F1 calendar have all been marred with some trouble or another. The inaugural race weekend in 2021 saw Amesty International put up a huge protest over the Human Rights record of the middle eastern state.

Then after missing a season due to Qatar hosting the FIFA world cup, the 2023 Grand Prix was held in sweltering conditions which made a number of the drivers ill. Esteban Ocon revealed he had been sick during the Grand Prix inside his helmet, whilst Logan Sargeant had to retire due to exhaustion.

That weekend revealed the inappropriate nature of the Losail circuit for F1 cars as the high speed, high grip layout along with razor kerbs began shredding the tyres. Pirelli were forced to demand the circuit be re profiled on Saturday to reduce the impact on the rubber and they increased the minimum tyre pressures in an attempt to prevent high speed punctures

The tyres were also mandated to be used for just 18 laps. Despite all this four drivers still suffered this fate during the Grand Prix.

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Pirelli up the tyre pressure

While the 2024 Qatar Grand Prix passed off with relatively few drama’s Pirelli discovered after the race deep cuts in their tyres, once again produced by the high speed, super grippy track and the newly installed gravel traps. So for 2025 they again mandated the tyres could not be used for more than 25 laps, which ruined the strategic options for the teams during the Grand Prix.

After first practice, Pirelli again upped the minimum tyre pressure due to further concerns over potential punctures. This appeared to do the job until with two laps to go Iasck Hadjar was seen crawling back to the pits with his front left tyre blown – clearly the 25 laps allowed on the rubber was a marginal call.

The outcome of Pirelli demanding the tyre pressures be raised to almost road car like levels mean a number of the teams could not set their cars up in th optimum fashion. Ferrari suffered most from this last minute regulation and the effect on the SF-25 was similar to that suffered by Charles Leclerc in Hungary.

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Ferrari turned off development in April

In Budapest, Leclerc was conformably leading the race before his final pit stop. Yet within a lap of receiving his fresh rubber, the Monegasque driver was dismayed with what the team had done.

“I can feel what we discussed before the race… we need to discuss those things before doing them,” he demanded of his race engineer. “This is so incredibly frustrating! We’ve lost all competitiveness! You just have to listen to me! I would have found a different way of managing those issues. Now it’s just undriveable, undriveable! It’s a miracle if we finish on the podium!”

Leclerc trailed home a distant fourth, more than 40 seconds of the pace of the race winner. Of course Ferrari had inflated the pressures on his tyres to the point where the car lost all its key adhesion to the circuit. The reason they did this was because they were concerned the ride height was getting dangerously close to the legal limit.

Having revealed earlier in the weekend that Ferrari had stopped all aerodynamic development of the SF-25 in April, Fred Vasseur was pressed as to whether this decision had turned the car into a mid-field operator.

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Ferrari hope for one last hurrah

“Honestly not,” he insisted. “But at the end of the day, we don’t have to mix everything, because in Austin we were on the podium. It means that it’s not just about development. The others, they didn’t develop between Austin and today.”

Vasseur returned to his key excuse for the woeful performance of Ferrari in Qatar. “I think that this weekend we struggled a lot with the set-up, and [it’s] probably also linked to the prescription of the tyre pressure. We struggled from lap one to the last lap of the race. It was probably a bit better today, but marginally. But it’s part of the explanation. But the main part of the situation of this weekend is linked to the set-up from lap one. We were in a tough situation.

Ferrari leave Qatar hoping for some kind of result in Abu Dhabi that will take them into what is the shortest even F1 winter break, where the pressure to deliver the 2026 cars for the last week of January will be huge.

Tyre pressure is the latest excuse from the Scuderia as to why their season has been so poor, there may be a new one coming after the chequered flag in Abu Dhabi, but then again maybe the team and the drivers just don’t care anymore.

 

 

 

Wolff SLAMS Verstappen’s “brainless” race engineer

Toto Wolff slams Lambiase suggestion as “brainless” – Whilst McLaren made a strategy call which would have made those at Ferrari proud, a small detail was playing out during the final two laps of the Qatar Grand Prix which mostly went un-noticed.

The Woking based team had made a disastrous strategy call during a lap 7 safety car, which in effect gave the rest of the field a free tyre change in a race where two stops were mandated. This meant Piastri and Norris Rivas were handed a free 26 seconds by the McLaren strategist being the time it usually takes at Losail to complete pit lane visit to a tyre change.

This locked the other nine teams into a race strategy where they would stop again on lap 32 then run 25 laps (The Pirelli maximum allowed per set of tyres) to the end of the race on lap 57. Norris however, performed his final pit stop on lap 44 giving him 12 lap fresher rubber than Antonelli and Sazin ahead who he was chasing down for third place…. READ MORE