Ferrari SF-25: why 2025 F1 car performs better in races than in qualifying. Ferrari is focusing on improving its qualifying performance by refining tyre management and car setup.

Ferrari is targeting the performance in the qualifying sessions in order to be able to improve its overall results. At the end of the Jeddah race weekend, Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur observed that the team needed to focus on improving its own performance in order to start further ahead on the grid. He explained that when this goal is achieved, the race changes entirely, with the potential to gain six or seven seconds in the first five or six laps instead of losing time. The performance gap between Saturday and Sunday stems from the aerodynamic concept of the SF-25, but that does not mean there is no room for improvement. The work on qualifying mostly involves tyre preparation, drawing on the expertise of the new technical director Loic Serra.

Good race pace
At the 6.174-kilometre Jeddah Corniche Circuit, the Ferrari Team Principal stated that for 35 laps, Charles Leclerc was faster than Oscar Piastri and Max Verstappen. However, it was an uneven comparison, as the Ferrari driver had tyres 10 laps fresher than the leading duo in the final 20 laps. Still, it is telling that once he found clean air after George Russell’s pit stop, the Monegasque driver lowered his lap times in the first stint, even being two tenths faster than Max Verstappen’s times at the end of his stint. A similar dynamic was observed in the comparison with Mercedes a week earlier at the Bahrain International Circuit, on a track and surface that are the complete opposite of the Saudi Arabian one.

The overall picture shows a very competitive Ferrari in terms of race conditions, unable, however, to express its pace while stuck in dirty air. Hence Frederic Vasseur’s push to focus efforts on Saturday performance: the French manager stated that they had struggled more in qualifying and needed to concentrate on that aspect. He pointed out that starting from fourth place meant being in dirty air, which led to losing a couple of seconds in the first five or six laps and also emphasized the importance of being more consistent throughout the entire weekend.

The similarities between the SF-25, the smooth asphalt and the fast corners of Jeddah highlighted another of Ferrari’s limitations. In qualifying, Charles Leclerc was on pole position pace for nearly the entire lap, losing all three and a half tenths in just the first two corners. In the race, once he found himself in clean air during the first stint, the Monegasque matched Max Verstappen’s times in the first sector just before the stop. This change of scene shows how the qualifying gap largely stemmed from tyre preparation, whose importance was also highlighted by the four-time Formula 1 world champion. In his final Q3 lap, the Dutchman improved his first sector by three tenths compared to the previous attempt, benefiting from Yuki Tsunoda’s slipstream and track evolution, but also from better tyre readiness in turn 1 after complaining about it just minutes earlier.

It is fair to wonder why Ferrari does not try to speed up the preparation lap to warm the tyres better. However, it is not just a matter of heating them up, but a broader issue related to compound exploitation. On the same track, for example, in 2024, Charles Leclerc tried the double prep lap technique, but was still faster with a single warm-up lap, even though the tyre was not yet in its optimal window. Ferrari’s problem is not heating the tyres, but extracting grip from the compound. The challenge is not just to bring the tyre in quickly, but to stabilize it as well, without overheating it over the rest of the lap.

The art of tyre preparation
The Maranello engineers and technicians are therefore working to improve what has gradually become a true art. As Simone Berra, Pirelli’s Chief Engineer, explained the previous year, tyre preparation involves a compromise between keeping the rear stable and ensuring the front is immediately ready for the first sector. The Italian engineer noted that balancing both axles is significantly more challenging in high ambient temperatures, whereas it becomes easier in cooler conditions and on circuits with many high-speed corners that assist in warming up the tyres.

In Jeddah, the abundance of fast corners helped with tyre preparation, subjecting the tyres to mostly lateral loads more evenly distributed across the four wheels compared to the stress of braking or traction, which concentrate on one of the two axles. However, complicating everything were the 37 degrees celsius on track in Q3, and especially the combination of a very soft compound with particularly smooth track surface, a mix that shrinks the tyre’s grip peak into an extremely narrow operating window. All this made it very easy to overheat the tyre by the end of the lap, requiring a cautious approach in the first few meters. Ferrari had an easier time in the race, precisely because the used tyre, once stabilized, could operate across a wider temperature range.

To improve, Ferrari is relying on the expertise of technical director Loic Serra, a tyre specialist. During the presentation of the SF-25 single-seater, the Frenchman explained that tyre management is closely connected not only to the car itself but also to the way the human element interacts with it, describing it as a fascinating blend of both areas. In Maranello, suspension setups will be studied to help the tyre work better over a single lap, but, as Adrian Newey reminds us, the setup is often complementary to the characteristics of the car’s concept.

Further room for improvement lies in the driving during the warm-up lap, a technique to be refined together with the drivers. To succeed, a better understanding of the new 2025 Pirelli tire will be necessary, with which teams are still taking their first steps. The Jeddah weekend marked only the second outing of the C5 compound this season, which will return in Miami, where Ferrari hopes to see some progress. Loic Serra had already cautioned back in February that tyre work is a continuous, never-ending process, whether it involves long-distance management or extracting greater performance over a single lap. The Ferrari technical director noted that they keep learning, and the more knowledge they gain, the more they can apply it to car design, setup decisions, or even adjustments to the driver’s style.

Qualifying struggles are not just a tyre issue, as the SF-25 inherits from the 2024 car an aerodynamic concept aimed at race performance. It is a consequence of the extreme sensitivity of ground effect cars to ride height, an aspect that forces teams to choose the optimal ground clearance for the floor. As Jock Clear, Ferrari’s Senior Performance Engineer, explained back in September, each team has its own approach to optimizing the car’s performance. The British engineer noted that this is why the hierarchy among the cars tends to shift slightly when moving from qualifying to the race.

Engineers often repeat that the way the car moves in relation to the ground changes completely between qualifying and race, both due to fuel load and, above all, due to speed. In a corner taken at 200 kilometers per hour in qualifying, going just 10 kilometers per hour slower in the race can reduce downforce by 100 kilograms, which is the equivalent of a full fuel tank. Jock Clear observed that in some corners, a car’s competitiveness may vary depending on the amount of fuel onboard and whether it is during qualifying or the race.

Therefore, performance over a single lap also depends on the operating point chosen for the SF-25 single-seater. The Ferrari technicians have room to adjust the setup, continuing to work on the trade-off between ride height and suspension stiffness to try to extract more performance from the floor in qualifying, as long as this does not compromise tyre wear in the race. On paper, further optimization would be possible through aerodynamic updates. This, however, will depend on how long Ferrari considers it worthwhile to continue developing the current project before shifting all resources to the 2026 Formula 1 car.