Ferrari’s season didn’t unravel overnight, but Fred Vasseur can point to the exact moment the thread got tugged: Shanghai. Lewis Hamilton’s sprint win, the subsequent disqualification for plank wear, and Charles Leclerc’s own exclusion for being underweight forced Maranello into survival mode. The immediate fix? Raise the car. The long tail? Lost performance.
“We had to leave ourselves a safety margin on ride height,” Vasseur admitted, conceding that Ferrari “lost our way a bit” after China. In this ground-effect era, a millimetre isn’t a tweak — it’s a grid position. Run too low and you risk a trip to the stewards; run higher and you watch the lap time bleed away.
Ferrari arrived in 2025 having changed concept for the final year of the current rules, an unusual gamble after missing the 2024 Constructors’ title by just 14 points to McLaren. But the SF-25 was immediately sensitive. The floor wanted to be close to the asphalt; reality demanded otherwise. From Australia onward, engineers were fighting the platform instead of tuning it, even instructing Hamilton and Leclerc to lift and coast on straights at times to protect the plank.
The attempt to claw back performance came with a significant rear-suspension package at Spa, designed to stabilise the car’s aero platform and open up setup. It looked promising. Then Budapest happened: Leclerc stuck it on pole and then slipped backwards in the race, Ferrari suspected by tyre pressures raised late to shield the floor. You could almost hear the sighs on the pit wall.
Vasseur didn’t sugarcoat it. Beyond the ride-height tightrope, he flagged “quality issues” and execution missteps early in the campaign. The knock-on effect was focus drift: when you’re firefighting legality and platform control, you’re not nailing tyre prep for quali or warm-up laps. And that’s where McLaren have been ruthless — supreme tyre management in tricky conditions, and none of the noise.
The raw pace hasn’t vanished. Vasseur reckons Ferrari have trimmed their deficit to roughly two tenths over the last few rounds. The problem is the path to that pace has been narrow and fragile, and every time they’ve edged forward, a new compromise has yanked them back.
Even so, Ferrari sit second in the Constructors’ standings heading to Zandvoort, albeit a long way behind McLaren with 10 rounds left. That’s the paradox of their year: the baseline is good enough to keep them in the mix, yet the edges are sharp enough to cut them when they lean in.
The job now is boring and brutal: lock down build quality, regain full control of ride height, and stop sacrificing setup freedom to appease the plank. Do that, and Ferrari’s qualifying bite should translate on Sundays. Don’t, and those millimetres will keep writing the season’s story — in papercuts.
