Disaster. That is truly the only word to describe Ferrari’s qualifying at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix. Nobody expected a miracle from the SF-25s, especially as early as Thursday when Lewis Hamilton had already asked fans for patience. But probably no one expected to see both Ferraris knocked out at the end of Q2, with Charles Leclerc starting 11th, just ahead of the seven-time world champion.
The issue was that, while all other drivers improved on their final attempts, the two Ferraris, after fitting new soft tyres, failed to better the times they had set on used ones. A scenario already seen in Miami, repeated here on a very different circuit. And a recurring issue that is becoming a clear Achilles’ heel for the Maranello team. Team principal Fred Vasseur is fully aware of this.
“It’s almost a copy-paste of what happened two weeks ago in Miami. We couldn’t improve with the new tyre set and set our best lap on the first Q2 run. Why? If we knew, we would have fixed it already. But it’s true that tyre behaviour was strange for everyone today. The pace was decent, because if we look at the first stint we were fifth and sixth on used tyres, but with the new set we didn’t improve, while the others found three or four tenths, and we paid the price,” Fred Vasseur told Sky Sport F1.
During the interview, Fred Vasseur heard Charles Leclerc saying the problem was simply a lack of potential in the SF-25. The French manager only partially agreed: “I think today the problem was 50-50 between execution and potential, because I believe that if we had done everything right we could have been fourth and fifth. The execution was not good, because we need to make the car work to its potential and today we didn’t do that — we failed to hold our used-tyre positions with new tyres. But the potential also isn’t good enough, because the goal isn’t to be fifth or sixth. It’s a mix of both — we’re lacking in execution and in car potential.”
Several rival teams, including Aston Martin, brought upgrades to Imola, while Ferrari is still trying to fully understand its current package. Fred Vasseur was asked whether that learning process is progressing: “If I say yes, I’d look like a fool after what we’ve done today. But I do believe Aston Martin was the only team to run all of qualifying on medium tyres and still finish fifth, so something unusual was definitely going on.”
The issue is that the upgrades will need to be properly understood when they arrive, but according to Fred Vasseur, that’s not the main concern: “When we talk about updates, we’re talking about tenths or hundredths of a second, not half a second. What we can do with the tyres, on the other hand, can gain us half a second. That’s probably the area where we need to better understand and extract more.”
The race pace looked good on Friday, so an attack could still be on the cards — although starting so far back at Imola is a significant handicap: “Everything’s still open, because our race pace yesterday was good, but overtaking here is very difficult. We’ll need to stay sharp and maybe take some strategic risks.”
Charles Leclerc publicly apologized to the fans, a sentiment echoed by the team principal: “There’s nothing more to say or do. We’ve got thousands of fans at the track and this is not what we wanted for them. So we must apologize, but also focus on the future and on tomorrow, doing our best for them and for ourselves.”
