F1 insights: how Ferrari engineers aim to fix the SF-25’s weaknesses amid key corrections

The Ferrari SF-25 unfortunately continues to disappoint in this Formula 1 championship. From a technical perspective, the situation sometimes appears even worse than it really is. The SF-25 is often referred to as a car that does not perform, but this is not entirely true. There are very narrow operating windows in which the car works very well. It is therefore not a “throwaway” car, even though at the moment it is not capable of challenging its main rivals for race victories.

There have been few weekends when two aspects coincided: the skill in nailing the setup and the whole team’s ability to complete a clean weekend. At the Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve in Montreal, the second aspect was missing, partly due to an imprecise Charles Leclerc, who is not to be blamed entirely. The Monegasque driver knows he made a mistake on Friday, but if he did, it was because he was overperforming to cover the car’s flaws. Without him, the situation would be much more critical.

So let’s take a detailed look at the reasons behind yet another bad race for the Maranello team. From a purely technical point of view, the weakest point of the SF-25 single-seater is the management of the tires over a single lap. Keeping the two tires on the four corners of the car within the correct operating window throughout the lap is very complicated for the Maranello team’s car. On the North American track, managing surface temperatures was more important, but the Ferrari engineers and technicians unfortunately failed to take advantage of this.

Despite the fact that performance over a weekend cannot be narrowed down to a single sector of a track, Charles Leclerc’s purple in the first sector of his final Q3 run is an important sign on the tire issue. The SF-25 often struggles to bring the tires into the correct working range, and this aspect is especially evident in the first corners of every track. The absence of wide-radius, high-speed corners was a strong advantage. The widespread adoption of higher ride heights could have brought the car closer to the front group and partly did. Finally, the type of compound management required was more favorable to the characteristics of the Red car. However, nothing was concretely achieved, once again. Several additional problems not typical of the car accumulated.

In the Canadian Grand Prix, Charles Leclerc’s first stint was completely ruined by an excessive need to perform lift and coast. This term refers to a very common technique in which the driver does not immediately go from throttle to brake but instead has a neutral phase where neither accelerating nor braking occurs. It happens before approaching the braking point. It was said this was needed in order to reduce skid wear and avoid disqualifications like happened in the Chinese Grand Prix.

However, reflecting on the Maranello team’s radio communications in Montreal, the race was finished with the skid plate far from irregular. In fact, the problem mainly concerned the operating temperatures of the brakes. The unexpected excessive heat on Sunday caught the team unprepared, forcing them to manage brake temperatures more than expected.

So what must Ferrari do to be able to recover the gap in this 2025 Formula 1 championship? In recent days, paddock rumors surround the Maranello team, around which there is much confusion. Lewis Hamilton very clearly called for aerodynamic updates in the upcoming races. Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur responded that something will come, but that is not the real problem. So what path should be followed? As we have seen in several races, the SF-25 is mainly blocked by two major problems:

On one hand, the aforementioned thermal management; on the other, the lack of aerodynamic downforce. This is evident by observing the track. The roots of these problems are rather complicated to identify since several secondary issues combine to limit performance. The truth is always somewhere in between. Let us clarify. Minor updates will arrive in the next races. These updates aim to widen the car’s operating window. Not to forget that simultaneously it is imperative to increase understanding of the car. Moreover, Ferrari is not standing still. The fact that there are no updates in the FIA’s classic technical update document does not mean the team has not worked to widen the operating window through other modifications.

They must try to make the car competitive by transferring to the track what the technical department sees in simulation environments. Tracks like the Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve in Montreal and the Red Bull Ring in Austria are favorable to the Red car. For this reason, at the Red Bull Ring, the Italian side should have another chance, one they cannot afford to miss. The goal is to optimize the weekend, something that was not done in Canada.

At the same time, it is worth pointing out that the need not to make mistakes has delayed changes. The Ferrari engineers and technicians have been pushing for some time to try to introduce at Spielberg a new floor intended for future modifications. It remains to be seen if they will succeed. Otherwise, it is necessary to understand how to put the car in the best conditions to express itself through some small, sometimes almost invisible, minor modifications that combined can lead to concrete technical improvement.

Updates considered more substantial, like a complete aerodynamic package, are equally necessary. The car has an obvious lack of downforce that must be filled as much as possible, even though Ferrari, as mentioned, uses a philosophy that favors other characteristics. Bringing immediate corrections that could improve the development of vertical load could have been a double-edged sword.

A car that is often “out of the operating window” risks polluting track feedback. For this reason, there is a high risk that in the end they may not work. Hence the long wait, remembering that reshaping the floor is always quite risky, especially considering how the SF-25 is struggling to use the correct ride heights. In the coming weeks, the situation will finally unlock. This long wait is almost over.