Ferrari are still nursing the scars of Shanghai.
Months after that double disqualification in China, team boss Fred Vasseur admits the Scuderia have been running with a deliberate safety cushion on ride height — a small change with big consequences in this ground-effect era. And while the engineers try to claw back what’s been lost, Charles Leclerc has been spotted trialling a downforce-shedding front-wing device on a Ferrari mule car during a recent Pirelli tyre test, a clue to the kind of homework Maranello are prioritising.
Shanghai was the trigger point. Lewis Hamilton’s first grand prix weekend in red produced a dramatic split-screen: Sprint win on Saturday, then a Sunday race that ended with a disqualification for excessive plank wear after he’d taken the flag in sixth. To compound it, Leclerc’s car was thrown out for being underweight. Since then, Hamilton revealed, Ferrari have been “running higher than we would like” — a quiet, logical response that trades performance for certainty.
Vasseur hasn’t sugar-coated the effect. Speaking to Auto Motor und Sport, he conceded the DSQs knocked Ferrari off stride. The team, he said, have had to leave a margin on ground clearance because these cars react violently to the smallest change in ride height. In 2025, a millimetre isn’t fine detail — it’s grid position.
That sensitivity has reshaped Ferrari’s priorities. Vasseur described a two-year push toward stabilising the aero platform — making the car driveable and predictable when it’s rolling, pitching, and turning — even if that means resisting the temptation to chase headline downforce numbers. When the platform isn’t fully under control, the lap time vanishes in chunks.
And it hasn’t been a straight line. Early-season handling headaches, quality niggles, then Shanghai. “We lost the thread a bit,” Vasseur admitted. In F1, chase the wrong thing for a few weeks and the field will make you pay. The front wing experiment Leclerc ran at the tyre test fits that narrative: bleeding load to keep the platform calm and correlate the car more reliably over long runs. It’s the kind of tweak that suggests Ferrari are trying to box clever rather than just throw more downforce at the stopwatch.
Context matters too, because this fight is now about finishing order, not fairy tales. With six races to go, McLaren have already shut the door on the Constructors’ title. Behind them, it’s a knife-edge three-way for the remaining places: Mercedes holding the upper hand, Ferrari next, Red Bull snapping close behind. Ferrari’s tally sits at 298 points — 27 shy of Mercedes and eight clear of Red Bull — and every session counts when the margins are this thin.
There’s no hint of panic inside, but there’s no spin either. Vasseur keeps repeating the same refrain to anyone who asks for a quick fix: there isn’t one. No magic wing. No miracle upgrade. Just a long list of small steps that add up. He even broke it down: the kind of gains that win you tenths come from tens of tiny improvements, not one silver bullet.
That’s why the image of Leclerc lapping with a load-shedding front-wing tweak is telling. Ferrari know the stopwatch hates inconsistency more than it loves peak downforce. If you can stop the aero platform from yo-yoing when the car squats or hits a bump, you make the operating window bigger — the tyre works, the driver trusts it, and you stop burning weekends on set-up firefighting. It’s unspectacular work, but it’s where this season’s points will be won.
Hamilton’s arrival at Maranello was always going to accelerate the standards and the urgency. Shanghai’s Sprint win proved the car has flashes of serious pace. The Sunday sting showed the cost of living on the edge without perfect control. Since then, Ferrari have played it conservative on ride height while trying to earn back the right to be aggressive.
The goal over the final flyaways is simple: remove the safety nets without falling off the tightrope. If Ferrari can stabilise the platform and trim that ride-height margin without inviting another scrutineering nightmare, second place in the championship is within reach. If they can’t, they’ll be looking over their shoulder at Red Bull all the way to Abu Dhabi.
As Vasseur put it, there’s no magic. Just the grind. And right now, every millimetre matters.
