Ferrari’s 2025 failure: Why Charles Leclerc’s Mercedes comparison is too kind to Maranello. Charles Leclerc compares Ferrari’s 2025 performance to Mercedes.

The constructors’ championship lost at the final Grand Prix of the year in Abu Dhabi and huge hopes for the season to come. This is not a dream, but simply a reference to last winter, when Ferrari, thanks to the performance of the SF-24, came within a whisker of winning the world constructors’ title, a result missing in Maranello since 2008. The Scuderia fought McLaren right down to the final corner of the Yas Marina circuit, keeping the battle alive until the very end.

Unfortunately, once the 2025 season got underway, with an SF-25 that was deeply revised in several key technical solutions compared to 2024, drivers Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton were soon forced to face reality. Winning the constructors’ championship, with such a strong McLaren, would not be possible. It would prove difficult even to fight consistently for podium finishes, let alone for victories. Zero wins over the course of the entire championship. A scenario that has repeated itself in recent history, as fans will remember well, in 2020 and 2021. A very meagre return, especially considering that under stable regulations Ferrari came off a 2024 season with five Grand Prix wins.

Leclerc allows himself an excess of generosity

After this overview, it is therefore reasonable to believe that Charles Leclerc was rather generous in comparing the performance of the Ferrari SF-25 to that of the Mercedes W16. According to the Monegasque driver, the Brackley-based team was the closest rival to Ferrari during the 2025 season: “I believe, in terms of feeling, that our team did a good job of maximising the car’s performance over the entire year.”

The reality, however, is that “the car’s performance was not sufficient”, as reported by Autosport.com.

“Mercedes were the closest team this year. They also had many ups and downs. We were even more consistent, but unfortunately we are always behind and we cannot keep up with the guys at the front,” Leclerc said, pointing to race pace as the main problem throughout the season.

Ferrari finished the year in fourth place in the constructors’ championship, 435 points behind McLaren, 71 behind Mercedes and 53 behind Red Bull. It is possible to agree with Charles on the aspect of consistency, but ultimately Ferrari were almost always consistently behind. Even the Milton Keynes-based Red Bull team, despite effectively racing with just one car for much of the season, proved superior overall. This is especially evident when considering that Max Verstappen was the driver who secured more victories than the reigning world champion, Lando Norris.

The Mercedes W16 was probably the car closest in performance to the Ferrari SF-25, and in that sense the comparison has some foundation. It was closer, yes, but still clearly distant. Comparing Ferrari’s overall performance to that of Mercedes therefore appears, in our view, to be an overly generous assessment of the work carried out in Maranello over the course of the season.

As the curtain falls on a lackluster 2025 for the Scuderia, the focus now shifts entirely to the 2026 technical revolution. With zero wins to their name this year and a performance gap that Leclerc himself seems to be downplaying, Ferrari faces an uphill battle to regain its status as a title contender. Whether the Maranello engineers can turn this “generous” assessment into actual on-track performance in the new era remains to be seen, but for now, the gap to the front remains a sobering reality for the Tifosi.