Ferrari’s SF-25 is a step backward: the numbers don’t lie. Ferrari’s 2025 season starts in crisis.

Just open the Formula 1 standings to draw conclusions about Ferrari’s first quarter of the 2025 Formula 1 season: Charles Leclerc is 78 points behind the leader, and the Maranello team is an astonishing 152 points behind a McLaren that is striking fear into everyone. These numbers would already be a heavy blow to Ferrari’s championship even if it were October, considering the goals publicly set over the winter — and yet it is only early May. The Miami Grand Prix weekend put a definitive end to the work done in Maranello over the past few months, as such a large gap in a dry race unaffected by traffic has not been seen since the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix two seasons ago. After that weekend, Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur admitted that such a results was not expected after two races.

It was unacceptable to have this gap on the hard tyres and the French manager urged his team to fix the situation. In this early part of the 2025 Formula 1 season, Ferrari’s team principal is less drastic in his comments, reluctant to write off a car that is disappointing both insiders and fans. The development plan reflects this trust despite a massive gap to McLaren: the new suspension — whose debut date remains unknown — could confirm whether the car has genuine potential.

Recurring qualifying issues hamper Ferrari, as the Maranello team’s engineers and technician face the same problems they did in the 2024 Formula 1 campaign, but with different cuses. The SF-25 single-seater inherited a key trait from the SF-24 — a car that had highs and lows but never reached perfection even during winning weekends — and that is its struggle to deliver performance in terms of qualifying pace. Especially in the first half of the previous season, the SF-24 struggled to generate enough energy to activate the tyres, and the lack of grip at the start of flying laps often heavily compromised performance. Moreover, while last year’s car was very neutral between the front and rear axles — making it hard to target the balance toward one or the other — this car is the exact opposite. In practice, this has mainly troubled Lewis Hamilton, while allowing Charles Leclerc to make a significant difference and extract the maximum from the SF-25 in qualifying — something the Monegasque driver struggled to do last season, which prevented him from standing out on Saturdays.

The SF-25 has a problem with its aerodynamic operating window: since the first year of the ground-effect regulations, having a wide range of setups — especially in terms of ride heights at which the car performs well — has become increasingly essential to be fast and consistently competitive. The narrow operating window of the baseline SF-25 is comparable to that of Mercedes in past years and is often missed by the engineers, as was the case in Miami, where they have to contend with a major structural issue at the rear. Unlocking the car’s potential — the keyword of this early season — largely depends on that, but for now the car’s intrinsic limitations prevent performance optimization.

In Miami qualifying, a tyre-related issue also emerged: in the final phase of the session, Charles Leclerc went out on used tyres to set his flying lap, improving by three tenths over his Q2 time set with new tyres. This is a characteristic behavior of the SF-24 and a weak point which the Ferrari engineers and technicians aimed to eliminate over the winter, but clearly failed to address. The result is an average deficit of four tenths to McLaren on Saturdays — numbers similar to those seen between Barcelona and Zandvoort in 2024, the worst stretch of the Italian team’s season, as explained by F1 expert Andrea Vergani for autoracer.it.

The first six races mark the first quarter of the 2025 Formula 1 season, and the outlook is undeniably negative: Ferrari has yet to establish itself as the second force, which was considered to be the bare minimum goal before the season began. Looking more closely at the numbers, the situation is reminiscent of last summer’s collapse, when Ferrari lost its way after the introduction of the aerodynamic update package at the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona, which was designed under the guidance of former Ferrari technical director Enrico Cardile and cost the Italian side two months to get back on track. The gap to McLaren ranged from three to four tenths per lap — closer to four in qualifying due to difficulty finding the correct working window to extract the most from the SF-24. In this early part of the 2025 Formula 1 season, the gap between the MCL39 and SF-25 is the same: four tenths in both qualifying and race pace separate Maranello’s disappointing car from Woking’s excellent one.

The difference between the 2024 and 2025 situations lies in the root of the problems, because correcting a poorly designed floor like that of Barcelona last year is not the same as solving a broader issue like that of the SF-25 single-seater. This includes a major deficiency in low-speed sections due to an unstable balance when the ride height is raised, and an inherent weakness in rear-end traction. In the Miami Grand Prix, it was evident how traction issues could even limit top speed — one of the few strengths seen this year.

At the Miami International Autodrome in Florida, a poorly optimized setup led to nearly half a second lost in the track’s slow corners due to excessive understeer, which then turned into oversteer after Saturday’s adjustments: it is now clear and well established that the operating window is extremely narrow. Nonetheless, Maranello continues to believe in and push forward with the 2025 Formula 1 project: Frédéric Vasseur’s words are no coincidence and echo the tone he used between June and July last year, when he spoke of the car’s potential to be unlocked through better setup work. That ultimately led to Monza, where a major aerodynamic upgrade package gave the Italian car enough of a performance boost to become, on average, the best car — at least in terms of points scored by Charles Leclerc — from the Italian GP to the season finale at the Yas Marina circuit in Abu Dhabi.