Ferrari has been struggling to achieve strong results in the 2025 Formula 1 season. But what is the real issue behind the team’s underperformance?
So far in 2025, Ferrari has secured five podiums with Charles Leclerc, while Lewis Hamilton has yet to reach the podium in any of the 17 races completed. These results have fallen short of pre-season expectations. In the Constructors’ Championship, Ferrari fought for the title until the last race in 2024, but this year, McLaren established an early advantage that has effectively ended Ferrari’s hopes.
During the latest race weekend, Ferrari even lost second place in the Constructors’ Championship to Mercedes. The gap is minimal—just four points—but with fewer races remaining, there is no margin for error. According to former F1 driver Jolyon Palmer, the true problem for Ferrari is not the SF-25 itself, but something else entirely.
The decisive factor
On the F1 Nation podcast, Jolyon Palmer admitted: “I’ve been focusing a lot on Ferrari in recent weeks, but now I’m lowering my expectations after a couple of false hopes. I still think they have a car that is faster than the Mercedes, but their execution isn’t there.”
Palmer believes that too many mistakes, both from the drivers and the team, have shaped Ferrari’s season. “At Monza, things were fairly okay; they finished where they deserved, just outside the podium. But in Baku, you have Hamilton on a used soft trying to get through Q2 and getting eliminated, then Leclerc crashes into the barriers in Q3, ending up 10th and 12th on the grid. That’s far from what the car should be capable of. It kind of sums up Ferrari’s season,” he explained.
According to Jolyon Palmer, Ferrari has the potential to secure second place in the Constructors’ Championship again this year, but they often fail to convert that potential into results. Singapore could theoretically be a circuit favorable to Ferrari, but even last year, Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc made mistakes that prevented them from maximizing their performance. The former driver added: “The number of times they come out of a race weekend with zero points in a catastrophic manner is incredible, when at least a top-five finish would have been possible. Logic suggests they should do well again this time: lower-speed circuit, better than Mercedes … but they need to deliver.”
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