The question Fred Vasseur keeps dodging — and Ferrari won’t answer

Despite what Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur has been telling us in the last few weeks, the Maranello team is floundering in Formula 1, constantly pushed around by surrounding events. A situation that is unacceptable for a team building cars for the top tier of motorsport and that has been losing for nearly seventeen years. All this while McLaren is expanding its dominance, while Red Bull, without its legendary car designer Adrian Newey, is being carried by Max Verstappen and clinging to the fight at the top. Not only that, because even Mercedes, on average, is stronger and faster than the Italian side. That unfortunately is the current depressing state of affairs.

Formula 1 is an inexact science, but people love numbers, namely reading about how much a future aerodynamic upgrade package might be worth, how much faster a car could go without a certain issue, or how many tenths are needed for a car to overtake another while suffering from turbulent air. But generally speaking, we are talking about hot air, since every single situation is shaped by countless variables.

Let’s look at a few examples in order to better understand. We will start with updates. On paper — or more accurately, in terms of computer simulations — a team estimates the advantage a new component could bring. But since it is only an estimate, it rarely reflects the reality seen on track. Especially when you consider that many factors on the track cannot be accounted for in a simulator. The same goes for car failures, such as aerodynamic problems.

Issues possibly caused by broken parts which, in theory, should slow the car down. And yet how many times have we seen damage that did not hinder performance nearly as much as expected, leaving engineers surprised and wondering how it is even possible? But it happens in Formula 1. The same applies to the turbulent air topic. It is said you need at least a one-second advantage to overtake in this 2025 Formula 1 championship.

Too bad that, once you analyze average pace at the end of a race — which reflects the actual rhythm a car can reach — you discover that some need a second, others a second and a half, while some manage with just three tenths. All this is to say that even the people involved often have no idea how to “handle” the numbers of a car — even one they supposedly know inside out.

This introduction leads us to the question we want to ask today, regarding the competitive hypothesis for the Ferrari SF-25 single-seater. Since the beginning of the 2025 Formula 1 season, we have been hearing a recurring refrain about the Maranello team that, at least personally, is not only intriguing but also a bit tiresome. We are talking about the supposedly still-untapped potential of the SF-25 car. A sluggish, dormant performance that just refuses to wake up and show itself.

Evidently, the powerful computers in Maranello underline this after every single session. They say: “Hey… looking at your fastest lap, there is still a three-tenth margin if you had extracted all the potential.” The three-tenths figure is hypothetical, of course. Same story for race pace, when we hear percentage estimates of a theoretical rhythm that never seems to materialize on track.

To make sense of all this, let us try to draw some conclusions. The scenarios could basically be three. The first two take Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur at his word, namely that the Maranello team indeed has some untapped potential. The third rejects the idea of this extra performance altogether, arguing it simply does not exist.

So, to sum up: if this blocked performance is real and shows up every time the SF-25 car hits the track, the failure to unlock it stems from a lack of ability from the Ferrari drivers, technicians, and engineers. But if this supposed hidden potential of the Ferrari SF-25 car does not actually exist, it means the tools used to make those calculations are flawed, or at least skewed by some correlation issue.

Then again, this would not be the first time such a thing has happened in Formula 1. And here is a specific recent example in order to support this idea: it is not like the group of Mercedes engineers — the same ones who dominated the Formula 1 world championship for eight years — suddenly became clueless and failed to realize that the so-called “zero pod” concept was flawed. Clearly, the correlation was feeding them bad data.

But let’s get back to Ferrari as we would like to know the truth. And getting it might be fairly simple. It would be enough to ask a few questions in a press conference or TV interview with the head of racing operations. First of all: how much is this supposed performance that Ferrari has not been able to extract in this start of the 2025 Formula 1 season? That question could be followed by another interesting one.

The locked-in performance that is always being mentioned — is it only visible in the simulations, or will it eventually come to life and be confirmed on track? And also: is it possible to unlock it, and do you already know which area of the car you need to work on to wake it up, or are you just going by trial and error? These may sound like simple questions — but since no one has asked them in four months of Formula 1, getting an answer would not be too bad for us fans.