Ferrari continues to struggle in F1, a trend that has unfortunately become all too familiar. Kimi Antonelli, on the other hand, proves that talent is something innate, a gift given by nature at birth. For the Bolognese driver, this is his first experience in Miami, on a track where the feeder formulas don’t race. During the practice sessions, the Brackley team chose to focus exclusively on long runs, not allowing the young Italian driver to use the Soft tires.
The other side of Italy’s “national” motorsport team was disappointing. Ferrari’s drivers finished in sixth and seventh positions, once again hindered by balance issues and tire management. This is all due to insufficient car setup. The persistent understeering problem remains the main cause of SF-25’s struggles in qualifying.
Kimi Antonelli shines with Soft tires
Phenomenal: one of the many adjectives that can be used to describe Kimi Antonelli, who has brought the Italian tricolor to the forefront. The 18-year-old from Bologna secured his pole position thanks to a perfect tire preparation phase. Although he hadn’t tested the red tires during the free practice sessions with his Mercedes, Kimi studied this phase thoroughly with his engineers.
The pole position for the 100 km sprint race came thanks to intelligent tire management throughout the entire lap, also taking advantage of the excellent efficiency of the British car. In the slowest part of the track, between the second and third sectors, the Italian driver was conservative on braking and made the difference with much better traction on the exits.
Ferrari: too much rear load and understeering hinder SF-25
The Italian team did the opposite: they failed to get the tires to work properly. Once again, Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc performed an imperfect tire preparation phase, starting their flying lap with temperatures far from the target. This is directly linked to the car’s balance, compromised by the setup choices the team had to make.
At the moment, the car’s setup is too compromised: engineers moved the center of pressure towards the rear to ensure more stability, useful for thermal management during the long run, but ineffective for a flying lap. Specifically, the reduced front downforce prevented the drivers from getting the tires up to temperature, forcing them to battle understeering in the slow corners.
The lack of grip, caused by ineffective interaction between the tire and the asphalt, nullified the SF-25’s mechanical work in the slower parts of the track, compounded by setup limitations. This difficulty was evident in turn 8, where both Ferraris tried a delayed apex to introduce more steering angle at lower speed and suffer less from rotation issues.
The same happened in turns 11 and 17, located after two long straights that further lowered the tire temperatures, making the turn-in phase harder. Understeering then turned into oversteering on the exit phase, as happened to Leclerc between turns 12 and 14. Charles adopted an aggressive approach to braking, but it didn’t pay off. His delayed acceleration, caused by the oversteer, compromised his corner exit.
Hamilton tried to limit the damage with an earlier apex than his teammate, which allowed him to keep a more contained steering angle compared to Leclerc, suffering less from the load shift on exit. Although he was more in line with the competitors during acceleration and experienced less rotation loss, he was still slower than the Monegasque.
Oscar Piastri loses pole in the final corner
McLaren and Red Bull made the difference in two different parts of the track. Piastri lost pole position due to poorer tire management compared to Kimi Antonelli. The Australian had to be more conservative throughout the corner phase, achieving a lower minimum speed and applying the throttle later than the Italian. For this reason, he lost over a tenth of a second.
By doing so, he denied himself the opportunity to set the best time, despite having the highest average speed between turns 16 and 17. On the other hand, Red Bull slightly corrected the balance issues seen in FP1, making good use of the aerodynamic load provided by the car’s bodywork. Max was the fastest between turns 4 and 8, where he managed to let his car flow better and had to partialize the throttle less.
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