Vasseur backs Hamilton’s call to mute the noise as Ferrari staggers toward a winless 2025
Lewis Hamilton arrived in red to the sound of trumpets. Twenty-three races later, it’s been more flatline than fanfare. Ferrari’s first season with the seven-time World Champion has produced no podiums, plenty of bruises, and now a plea: turn down the volume.
Hamilton’s message after Qatar was pointed. He said the drumbeat of negativity around Maranello isn’t just headline fodder — it’s corrosive. “The negativity that’s constantly within the media… that affects them,” he said of the team. “They get home to their wives and their wives say, ‘they’ve been saying this about where you work,’ and I’m sure that’s tough… there’s a huge effect on lots of people.”
Ferrari boss Fred Vasseur didn’t flinch. Asked whether the noise has hurt, he agreed. “For sure, it’s not helping,” he told media in Lusail, where Ferrari scraped just four points — Charles Leclerc in P8, Hamilton P11. “But it’s our job that you do good results… as a team, we have to stay in our bubble and try to get the best from what we have.”
That “bubble” has been hard to maintain. The SF-25 arrived wearing big expectations — billed in Italy as roughly half a second better than last year’s car — and Ferrari carried real winter swagger. Hamilton’s shock switch from Mercedes only inflated the optimism. The fairytale pitch was irresistible: the sport’s most successful driver, in its most famous car, hunting down Michael Schumacher’s record in red.
The reality’s been jarring. Hamilton sits sixth in the standings on 152 points, still without a podium in Ferrari colors and 78 behind Leclerc. He’s called it his “worst” season in Formula 1, and admitted he’s “looking forward to it ending.” Not exactly the script anyone wrote back in February.
Layer in the rumor mill — talk that Vasseur was on the brink, whispers about Leclerc’s future — and you’ve got the full Maranello melodrama. Vasseur’s response? Keep the heads down, fix what’s fixable, and resist the urge to feed the carousel. “For sure you have ups and downs… you have to deal with this kind of situation.”
He pointed to the other side of the paddock for proof that swings can happen quickly. Max Verstappen, he noted, dragged a yawning points gap back into range — cutting a 104-point deficit to just 12 heading into the finale. “It means you can come back,” Vasseur said. “As a team, we have to try to understand what we did wrong this weekend.”
In Qatar, Ferrari’s own debrief centered on tyres. Vasseur said the mandated pressures left them “a bit like on a balloon all weekend.” Grip was elusive, the window narrow, and the SF-25 never looked balanced over a stint. “We struggled to deal with [it]… it’s the same for everybody; it means we did a worse job than the others.”
The broader math is unforgiving. Ferrari has one last shot in Abu Dhabi to avoid its first winless campaign since the droughts that still haunt the halls of Gestione Sportiva. The constructors’ fight is effectively done: fourth place is locked, with Ferrari’s 382 points short of Red Bull’s 426 and only 43 left on the table. There will be no late heist, only a question of whether pride delivers a final-weekend punch.
There’s also the human factor Hamilton was so keen to underline. Ferrari’s engineers and mechanics know the score; they don’t need the news cycle to remind them. But a team under siege rarely performs better. Sometimes the only way out is to shrink the world to what’s in front of you — a Friday run plan, a setup corner, a clean stop — and ignore the rest.
The irony is Ferrari hasn’t been slow everywhere. The SF-25 has flashes — and Leclerc’s points haul proves the car can live in the top six. It’s the volatility, the missed windows and operational stumbles, that’s dragged it into the long grass. Hamilton’s side of the garage, in particular, has been snakebitten.
Abu Dhabi, then, isn’t a miracle mission. It’s a chance to stop the bleeding and bank something to take into the winter. To validate a few development paths. To give Hamilton — who’s worn this season with admirable bluntness — at least a sliver of momentum before the shutters come down.
Vasseur and Hamilton singing from the same hymn sheet matters. Ferrari’s problem this year hasn’t been a lack of voices; it’s been a lack of harmony. If the bubble holds — and if Ferrari can keep the SF-25 in that fickle operating window — one clean weekend won’t change the narrative, but it could mute it.
Noise won’t win them a race. Quiet, for once, just might.
