What can be said about Ferrari? We could talk about a thousand things, but the most fitting words to define this SF-25 in its Miami version are unpredictable and inconsistent. A car that is extremely difficult to manage, where Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc try to work miracles to achieve disappointing results. This is essentially the key storyline of the Florida weekend, a track that exposed the Ferrari car’s limits much more than the Maranello engineers had anticipated.
Telemetry data from the sectors reveal Ferrari’s problems. The Miami qualifying session shows an SF-25 car in clear increasing difficulty compared to what was seen in the Friday Sprint Shootout. Charles Leclerc finishes with a significant gap: +0.550 seconds from the top, confirming a worrying trend for the SF-25. Part of this worsening can be explained by a known factor: the necessary higher ride heights between the Sprint and the race.
And for a project so sensitive to ride height like Ferrari’s, this transition represents a concrete obstacle to performance. The data speaks for itself: the bulk of the difficulties are concentrated in the first sector, where Charles Leclerc loses as much as 0.422 seconds from the reference, and in the second sector, where Ferrari is only the ninth fastest of all the cars. A detailed analysis of the lap reveals a Monegasque forced to make continuous micro-corrections.
In particular, he does this to stabilize a rear axle that proved unstable and twitchy throughout the session. The SF-25’s balance was clearly too delicate, and oversteering “killed” the performance out of the corners. Meanwhile, in the slow section, from corner 11 to 16, the Red car looked more like a rally car than a Formula 1 single-seater: countless meters driven sideways, losing traction and confidence turn after turn.
With telemetry in hand, a first critical moment is immediately noticeable at the braking of turn 1: Charles Leclerc loses more than two tenths compared to Max Verstappen. The Dutchman brakes later, for less time, carries +3 kilometers per hour at the center of the corner, and manages to get back on the gas sooner, even approaching turn 2 almost at full throttle. Meanwhile, Charles Leclerc still needs a few more meters before he can trust the car and floor the accelerator.
The trend repeats itself at turn 4, where the Monegasque is forced to make a significant braking adjustment to insert the car properly, losing another 0.035 seconds. The unstable setup does not allow him to be precise, and this is costly on a track where every corner is closely linked to the next. Turn 6-7, the long sweeping corner on the limit, is another weak point where he loses a tenth.
The SF-25 visibly slides at the rear. On the straights, it manages to limit the damage, indicating that drag is not the main issue, but in the slow section from turn 11 to 16, the car’s behavior was at times truly incomprehensible. Charles Leclerc, just like Lewis Hamilton, is constantly forced into counter-steering to control a rear end that tends to break loose.
This behavior strains the rear tires, causing them to overheat quickly: traction and stability are absent. Only between turns 11 and 13, Charles Leclerc loses 0.185 seconds, a massive margin in such a short space. The moment that best sums up the situation comes via radio, at the end of the lap, when Charles Leclerc exclaims: “My God, I have no idea what’s happening. And that was even a good lap. I don’t understand.”
These are words that carry weight, because they were spoken by a driver who rarely lets such comments slip. In summary, what was seen on Saturday was a Ferrari that was completely unpredictable, unstable, and especially fragile in traction and in the phases where good mechanical grip is crucial. Until the Maranello team finds a solution in this area, it will be difficult to expect any real step forward compared to the other top teams.
—- see video above —
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