Scuderia Ferrari may occupy second place in the 2025 Formula 1 constructors’ championship at the mid-season break, but the campaign so far has fallen short of the Scuderia’s expectations for Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton.
The Italian powerhouse began the 2025 season with high hopes, believing they could contend for the teams’ championship after finishing just 14 points behind McLaren in last year’s standings. However, after 14 of the 24 rounds this season, Ferrari find themselves trailing their Woking rivals by a significant 299 points.
While McLaren’s Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris dominate the drivers’ championship with 284 and 275 points respectively, Ferrari’s stars, Leclerc and Hamilton, are positioned fifth and sixth with 151 and 109 points. Ferrari also remain the only team among the top four to have yet to secure a Grand Prix victory in 2025.
McLaren have already claimed 11 race wins, Red Bull have two, and Mercedes have taken one so far. Ferrari’s only high point came from Hamilton’s F1 Sprint win in China, while the team has collected just five Grand Prix podiums, all courtesy of Charles Leclerc.
Fred Vasseur admits Ferrari ‘scared’ him with the challenge of rolling out the rear suspension upgrade
Lewis Hamilton has yet to reach the podium in a Grand Prix this season, marking the longest podium-less stretch of his 19-year F1 career. Contributing to Ferrari’s struggles was the team’s first-ever double disqualification at the Chinese Grand Prix, where Hamilton was excluded due to excessive floor wear.
It wasn’t until the Belgian Grand Prix, 11 rounds later, that Ferrari introduced a rear suspension upgrade at Spa, intended to address the car’s performance inconsistencies. Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur has revealed that he initially felt “a bit scared” about deploying the update during a Sprint weekend.
Fred Vasseur explained to The Race that he was concerned about the complexity of testing multiple setups in the compressed format: “I was a bit scared when I arrived in Spa because they said, ‘OK, on the Sprint weekend, you have to test five different compound ways there, and so it will be difficult to make adjustments.’ But, in the end, it went pretty well.”
Lewis Hamilton’s disqualification in China was a pivotal moment that derailed Ferrari’s early 2025 campaign
Ferrari technical director Loic Serra was forced to divert his attention from developing the car for the 2026 F1 regulations in order to design the unplanned rear suspension upgrade. The problems with Ferrari’s initial setup became fully apparent only after Hamilton’s disqualification in Shanghai.
Lewis Hamilton lost a P6 finish in the Chinese Grand Prix after failing the FIA’s plank wear check, with readings of 8.6mm, 8.6mm, and 8.5mm against the minimum 9mm requirement. Additionally, the original rear suspension setup made the SF-25 unpredictable, complicating Lewis Hamilton’s ability to extract maximum performance.
The effectiveness of the upgrade remains under scrutiny as the summer break approached, particularly after Ferrari compromised Charles Leclerc’s performance at the Hungarian Grand Prix to preserve his skid plank. Leclerc, who had been battling for the win, ultimately finished fourth to avoid excessive wear, raising questions about whether the Spa upgrade truly addressed the car’s underlying issues.
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