Ferrari has several problems in this start of the 2025 Formula 1 season due to a car that has been revolutionized in various concepts. A move that, at least for now, must unfortunately be judged negatively. Based on what has been seen so far, perhaps it would have been better to maintain the base of the 2024 car and develop it, correct it. The statement “we had reached the limit of the project” is starting to falter. These are suppositions, of course. The fact is that the work done for the 2025 Formula 1 championship is far from what was expected from the Maranello team’s technicians and engineers, which were expected to produce a championship-winning car after fighting for the F1 title last year against McLaren until the final race of the campaign.
Fortunately, there is a certain Charles Leclerc. The Monegasque, after five races in the current season, is the only real update of the Ferrari team, able, with his often unrecognized abilities, to show the Maranello team the path to take to escape the performance entropy that is sinking the Prancing Horse. The experienced Ferrari driver is the sole leader of this work group.
In addition to what was said in the introduction of the article, there is an interesting issue that is worth discussing. We are referring to the car’s performance in a particular speed range. Some clarifications needed to be made with data at hand to show that a large portion of the problems the Italian cars face in the more slower sections of the track comes from a specific factor.
During the last F1 weekend at the 6.174-kilometre Jeddah Corniche Circuit, the Italian team seemed to struggle with slow corners. This is a fact if we look at the telemetry data collected in Saudi Arabia. The rumor circulating these days is that the red car struggles with an endemic lack of mechanical grip. This is not at all true, and the issue is far more complex than it appears. Simplifying this concept, as seen on TV, is definitely wrong.
The same applies if we claim that Ferrari does not work in slow corners. Through the usual weekend analyses, we discussed how the Ferrari lost many tenths between the entry to turn 1 and the exit from turn 3. However, evaluating the telemetry averages of the other teams, one can see how the Italian car could have taken a step forward in this area.
Such a move would have allowed it to recover a significant amount of the gap lost in just a few hundred meters. We are talking about around 2 tenths, referring to the “ideal gap.” Unfortunately, in the qualifying session, the expected step forward did not come, and the final gap increased to 3.5 tenths. The Maranello team managed to improve the performance in this section only during the race, where, according to Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur as well, the performances were superior.
Some clarifications are necessary in order to understand the Maranello team’s work fully. We are talking about the first chicane of the track. Let’s consider an essential piece of data: these are the only corners considered “slow.” In several situations, such as at the Shanghai International Circuit in China, the SF-25 single-seater showed its ability to generate a lot of grip at low speeds.
We are talking about grip, especially longitudinal but also transverse. The basic grip exists, but once again, it is hard to unlock. All of this once again ties back to Jerome D’Ambrosio‘s comments, as the deputy team principal confirmed that the SF-25 is difficult to position in the correct operating window. Even though in Saudi Arabia, for the second time after Bahrain, the setup was not extreme, there are clear setup limitations.
Once again, the operating window is too short to cover every type of corner, and the lack of pure performance compared to McLaren obviously limits the type of setup that can be adopted. A delay of about 3 tenths of pure performance, or 0.06 seconds per kilometer, is evident. Ferrari, therefore, is forced to focus on optimizing one type of corner only, he fast ones, which, in Jeddah’s case, were numerically more frequent.
The type of suspension setup is very different, and in fast corners, stiffer settings are adopted to stabilize the floor as much as possible. This way, the variations in the car’s characteristic angles, namely roll, yaw, and pitch, are minimized. The difficulties Ferrari faces in the slower sections are not inherent but specific to the F1 track and depend on the type of setup they are forced to build.
Frederic Vasseur himself confirmed this, stating that there is no problem in the slow corners. On the contrary, the troubles continue to be others, highlighted by our editorial team every weekend. Mainly, there are two issues: the lack of downforce compared to the Red Bull RB21 and the McLaren MCL39, and the excessively understeering behaviour, which only Charles Leclerc is partly able to manage, even though it still causes the loss of several fractions of a second.
— see video above —
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