Ferrari’s internal crisis: problems born between factory and racetrack

Ferrari’s current crisis is the result of multiple issues, both in the design of the SF-25 and in its management on track.

The hardest image for Ferrari to accept is McLaren’s celebration of the 2025 Formula 1 Constructors’ Championship with six races still to go — the same McLaren team that just one year ago was battling the Scuderia until the final round in Abu Dhabi. Throughout the season, many wondered what McLaren’s secret weapon was, but the truth is that the “papaya” car’s superiority is simply the product of excellence in every technical area.

For Ferrari, there is no single fundamental flaw to explain what has become its most difficult campaign in the ground-effect era. Instead, this troubled season is the sum of numerous weaknesses — both in the car itself and in how it has been managed at the circuit.

The last straw
For Frederic Vasseur, Lewis Hamilton’s near retirement in the closing stages of the Singapore Grand Prix due to overheated brakes was the moment that broke the camel’s back. For the first time, the Team Principal did not hide his frustration, openly criticizing in the press conference the excessive brake temperatures that plagued both cars from start to finish.

Both Ferrari drivers were instructed to use lift and coast for nearly the entire race, easing off the throttle before the braking zones. In the past, Ferrari had perhaps relied too little on this technique, but in recent seasons the Maranello team has tried to take a more aggressive approach. Accepting to use lift and coast allows a more aggressive cooling configuration, which brings qualifying benefits and enables the team to carry less fuel, improving tire performance as a result.

However, when lift and coast turns from a strategy into a necessity, it becomes a sign of deeper issues. As Frederic Vasseur remarked, “you can’t spend 95% of the race managing,” since it deprives the drivers of proper references and forces them to constantly alter brake balance. The Team Principal’s outburst revealed built-up frustration, suggesting that brake overheating incidents have been recurring throughout the year. These problems seem unrelated to Brembo components and instead point toward Ferrari’s own cooling design choices.

Brake overheating has not been the only technical headache of the 2025 Formula 1 championship. Charles Leclerc reported power steering issues in some qualifying sessions, and the team also suffered a power unit drop at the Baku City Circuit in Azerbaijan. These small but significant faults prevent an already limited car from performing at its best, adding to the tension inside a team that is clearly going through a difficult moment.

The limits of the project
At the center of Ferrari’s crisis is the SF-25, a car whose shortcomings are now well known. Overall, its design concept is relatively well balanced, performing decently on traditional circuits but lacking the peaks of performance Ferrari once managed on less conventional tracks. This has earned the SF-25 a reputation as a mediocre car, not because it is fundamentally flawed, but because it simply lacks outright pace — despite a major overhaul compared to the 2024 project, including the switch to a pull-rod front suspension aimed at unlocking new aerodynamic development potential.

The early-season gap only grew as the year progressed, with Ferrari unable to match the development rate of its rivals. The new rear suspension brought some advantages but did not solve the car’s underlying problems. The resources dedicated to mechanical changes also limited aerodynamic upgrades, which effectively ended with the floor update introduced in Austria.

Moreover, Ferrari has struggled with what engineers call “horizontal development” — the ability to refine setup strategies to improve track performance. Mercedes and, especially, Red Bull have made major gains in this area, overtaking Ferrari in competitiveness and relegating the Scuderia to the role of fourth-best team.

Between factory and track
Terms like “execution” and “extracting potential” are now constant in the words of Ferrari’s drivers and team management. What might sound like a cliché actually reflects the awareness within Maranello that the team is not able to make the SF-25 work properly. In today’s ultra-close Formula 1, where a hundredth of a second can mean two or three grid positions, McLaren’s excellence in track operations stands out in sharp contrast to Ferrari’s difficulties.

Throughout the season, Ferrari has repeatedly pointed to recurring problems with ride height management, extreme sensitivity to environmental conditions, and tire performance during the qualifying sessions. For each of these areas, it is hard to determine where the fault lies — whether in the design team that produced a car with such a narrow operating window, or in the track engineering department, which must interpret, respect, and work around those limits.

This is not about assigning blame but about finding solutions. The real questions are why the SF-25 so rarely performs at its best and why its overall potential remains below that of its competitors — two sides of the same coin that define Ferrari’s ongoing crisis.

And you? What do you think about the Maranello team’s difficulties this year? Let us know with a comment at the end of the article or on our social media channels: Facebook Group / Facebook Page / Instagram / X (former Twitter) and TikTok.