This start to the season sees two of F1’s historic teams living through very different moments. McLaren is currently the best car and is emerging as the only serious contender for the Constructors’ Championship, while Ferrari, which hoped to fight for both championships, has taken a dramatic step back with its winter development. From competing for pole positions and wins by the thousandths at the end of last season to losing over a second per lap in Miami, Ferrari is at its lowest point performance-wise at the start of the 2025 season. Based on what we’ve seen on track so far, there are also parallels to be drawn between the SF-25 and the MCL39 with past cars, and once again, these comparisons only increase the regret for Ferrari.
Ferrari has fallen into the same mistakes as Red Bull: complex balance and mechanical deficiencies. In just a few months of development, Ferrari has gone from having strong points in slow corners, traction, and a very solid rear end to having these as absolute weaknesses of the SF-25. The 2025 car is severely lacking in these areas, and the winter revolution that aimed to change 99% of the components, altering the car’s structure and implementing an ambitious design, is not yielding the desired results.
The main achievement has been making the front end stronger than previous cars, but this is not fully usable due to an unexpectedly weak rear end. This is rooted in significant structural issues, which we’ve already analyzed, stemming from further extremes in the rear suspension, though still following the pull-rod design. However, these have led to undesirable problems. This issue makes it difficult for the engineers to set up the SF-25 within a wide operating window without risking floor wear, which can lead to disqualification, as happened in China. At the start of the race, despite carrying more weight, the car stays higher due to lower cornering speeds. Lowering it increases downforce, but the risk is that with an empty fuel tank and higher speeds, the plank could scrape too much, leading to excessive wear beyond what’s allowed.
The different height settings are seriously penalizing the SF-25, particularly in terms of downforce, and are preventing it from achieving balance with the front end. The solution to avoid massive understeer is either to lighten the front end—thus losing a strength—or to set up the car with a completely front-heavy balance, resulting in a practically “null” rear and excessive oversteer—this is the approach taken by Charles Leclerc, with all its limits, and which is penalizing Lewis Hamilton instead.
Furthermore, the imbalance is significantly hurting Ferrari in slow corners, and the weak rear end deprives the car of what has been a strength for it in the past: traction. This is because the car must run with stiffer setups, due to the rear suspension issues, which complicates curb attacks. Ferrari is facing many of the same issues that affected the Red Bull RB20 last season, and though in lesser degree, these problems are still present in the Anglo-Austrian car today. The RB21’s balance is still critical, but interventions between Jeddah and Miami have improved the situation slightly, though the problems have not been fully resolved. The SF-25 still carries some defects from the 2024 car, as analyzed earlier, which particularly affect qualifying. The aerodynamics-mechanics interaction remains a major limitation for the SF-25, and fixes are not immediate, as explained by F1 expert Paolo D’Alessandro for autoracer.
On top of this, the irony. The McLaren MCL39 has some features reminiscent of Ferrari’s F1-75. From having one of the best cars at the end of 2024 to struggling at the start of 2025, McLaren has surged ahead. But there’s more: looking at the MCL39, one can notice and even see some distinctive features that were characteristic of Ferrari’s first ground-effect car, the F1-75 of 2022. The Woking car has more downforce than any other, a good front end, and an excellent rear in terms of traction—only Mercedes can match it here—it has excellent tire management, runs very low, and has soft setups without excessively wearing the plank, and like the F1-75, it shares a deficit in straight-line efficiency.
That Ferrari, under Team Principal Mattia Binotto and technical directors David Sanchez and Enrico Cardile (all of whom are now no longer at Maranello), had chosen a bold and different path from others, and it was paying off. The first issues arose with the floor in France, but the F1-75 ultimately failed as a project with the introduction of TD39 in Spa, which also contributed to the problems in 2023, as the designers initially followed the same development path, convinced they could find countermeasures, only to have to shift to the downwash side, especially in the sidepods, starting from the Spanish GP in 2023.
McLaren is the only team that has not made a major mistake with an update package since Austria 2023. After an initial deficit at the beginning of 2024, with a delay in winter development, from Miami onwards, Andrea Stella’s team has made all the right choices. Only in Jeddah was a new diffuser introduced, which was not used and was not seen in Miami, so it will be interesting to see if it reappears in Imola, paired with other new components, or if it has been definitively discarded. Rivals point to McLaren’s tire management as its strength: they quickly get them working in qualifying and manage them better than anyone else in the race, especially as the asphalt temperatures rise.
The three competing teams, Mercedes, Red Bull, and Ferrari, can only keep pace with McLaren for brief moments, but it’s McLaren’s consistency that creates the significant gaps we see. Such an advantage raises suspicions, especially from Milton Keynes, where they are familiar with Rob Marshall’s extreme ideas. Could TD19 in Barcelona be an opportunity? Technical directives sometimes hit the mark, other times their impact is much less noticeable. In 2022, as we’ve already said, one such directive ruined Ferrari’s competitiveness.
— see video above —
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