The effort put into developing Ferrari’s new rear suspension appears to have compromised the performance of the SF-25, turning what could have been a promising season into a difficult campaign. The final year of the ground-effect era has become a true ordeal for the Scuderia, with the Singapore Grand Prix exposing once again one of the toughest weekends of the year for Maranello’s car.
The SF-25 continues to suffer from a very narrow operating window and multiple technical limitations that prevent it from reaching its full potential. During the race at Marina Bay, Ferrari once again struggled with ride height settings, while both drivers faced significant braking issues. Although the brake problem was the main obstacle, Charles Leclerc’s post-race comments suggested that the team may have once again raised the car’s height to avoid excessive plank wear — a move that inevitably hurt performance.
The nightmare of excessive plank wear began at the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne and will likely persist until the end of the season. At the heart of Ferrari’s issues lies the fact that the SF-25 cannot run with low ride heights without severely wearing out the floor. This technical limitation has defined the team’s struggles for much of the 2025 campaign.
After Melbourne, Ferrari immediately began working on a fix. The first update package arrived at the fourth round in Bahrain, and since then the engineers in Maranello have been locked in a race against time to identify the root cause of the problem. The culprit was eventually traced back to the rear suspension, which was unable to handle the car’s vertical loads efficiently. To compensate, the team was forced to stiffen the setup and raise the car, sacrificing aerodynamic performance. At high speeds, the suspension created an effect similar to a collapse, causing the car to bottom out and increasing wear on the plank. Ferrari’s technical department agreed that a completely new rear suspension was necessary.
A new suspension debuted at Spa, but a key detail has emerged
The design process for the new suspension began soon after, and after months of development, the updated version finally debuted at the Belgian Grand Prix in Spa-Francorchamps. However, the new component did not deliver the expected improvement. The same handling problems persisted, and the team’s poor results since the summer break speak for themselves.
In recent weeks, reports have surfaced revealing that Ferrari had planned further updates to the SF-25 that were ultimately canceled. According to the Italian daily newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport, the team originally intended to introduce aerodynamic upgrades to help mitigate the car’s weaknesses, but these never made it to the track. Ferrari chose instead to dedicate all available resources — both financial and technical — to the design and implementation of the new rear suspension. Due to limited time and budget, aerodynamic development was effectively put on hold.
Sources now claim that those canceled aerodynamic upgrades could have provided a more effective solution than the suspension redesign alone. It seems that the aerodynamics department was sidelined to give full priority to the vehicle dynamics division, a decision that may have cost Ferrari valuable performance during the season.
As the 2025 campaign heads into its final stretch, expectations within Maranello remain low. Attention has already shifted toward 2026, when the team will have a unique opportunity to regain competitiveness under the new technical regulations. Redesigning the SF-25 was a necessary step for Ferrari’s long-term ambitions, and the team likely anticipated some of these challenges — but in hindsight, this time they may have gone too far.
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