Ferrari left with “zero performance” after a year spent chasing potential | F1 Qatar GP. Ferrari’s disastrous Qatar Grand Prix exposed a season-long struggle for performance.

A whole year chasing potential only to discover “zero performance” at the second-to-last Grand Prix

Ferrari’s situation in Qatar was alarming, depressing, and discouraging all at once. The scale of the crisis was immediately clear in the words of the drivers – the same drivers who, according to some critics, “should focus on driving and talk less.”

After the Sprint, Lewis Hamilton explained: “We have no stability. When I say that, I mean the rear end slides and snaps a lot. And then there’s the bouncing – when we enter corners like Turn 10, the car starts bouncing. We have a lot of understeer in the middle of the corner, and then if we add steering, it snaps. There’s a difference between medium-, low- and high-speed corners, and it’s an incredible fight.”

Charles Leclerc, commenting after qualifying, was equally frustrated: “There is understeer in the middle of the corner, and oversteer both on entry and exit. Even just driving and keeping the car on track is difficult, and even by taking maximum risks and putting together a good lap, we didn’t do better than tenth place.”

In essence, it was a complete rejection of the SF-25’s performance. Yet only twenty days earlier, Ferrari chairman John Elkann had insisted: “If we look at our engineers, there’s no doubt that the car has improved.”

This raises a key question: when exactly did the engineers intervene on this car? Since April, Ferrari had admitted that “aerodynamic updates have been stopped.” The only true development introduced over the past 18–20 races was the new rear suspension. And yet, back in June, there had also been talk of “updates that are sometimes invisible.”

The result was a season effectively written off early, even though the team was still publicly claiming – as recently as last Sunday – that victory remained the target. That ambition was pushed from race to race, in a desperate pursuit of potential, perfect execution, and a red-painted Rubik’s cube that never aligned. One weekend it was bad luck, another it was the drivers, another it was “because with these Italian journalists you can’t win a championship.” In Baku, free practice supposedly “showed we are a winning team.” In Montreal, the highlight was “a record in Sector 1.” In Singapore, optimism came from being “one tenth away from McLaren.”

It is fair to wonder what, exactly, Ferrari can carry into 2026 from a year like this. Even the simulator work in Qatar came under fire, with Hamilton stating after the Sprint: “They found some things in the simulator on Friday night and we applied those changes to the car, but it was a completely wrong direction, and it was clear on both Ferraris.”

So how can a team arrive in Qatar saying it intends to fight for victory, only to deliver its worst performance of the entire season? Leclerc summed it up in brutally honest fashion when asked if he felt optimistic for the race: “Am I optimistic? No, and that’s quite rare. Normally I’m a very optimistic person, but I have to say that this weekend there is zero performance in this car. There is nothing in this car that makes me believe I will have a better feeling tomorrow.”

There is, perhaps, one positive, as John Elkann pointed out: “Our mechanics are effectively winning the championship with the level of performance they have shown with their pit stop work.”

Not everyone knows that Formula 1 has awarded the DHL Fastest Pit Stop Award since 2015, recognizing the best-performing pit crew across the season. Ferrari has already secured the title with a comfortable margin, ending a ten-year drought.

Even so, this feels like far too little to avoid calling the season disastrous. But in Las Vegas, team principal Frédéric Vasseur firmly rejected that label: “Until two weeks ago we were fighting for second place. It hasn’t been a total disaster; that’s not the right word. We were ahead of Mercedes and Red Bull, which means the situation is not that dramatic.”

Fine — let’s avoid calling it a disaster. In that case, we can borrow Charles Leclerc’s own descriptions, despite him being told to “speak less”: “A nightmare,” “a catastrophe.” Is that any better?