Austin on a Friday is usually Ferrari country. Lewis Hamilton has five wins here, Charles Leclerc is last year’s victor, and the red shirts tend to find their swagger under the Texas sun. Not this time.
Ferrari’s new pairing trudged out of Sprint qualifying with Hamilton eighth and Leclerc tenth, almost a second adrift of Max Verstappen’s pole lap and, more jarring, about four-tenths slower than Nico Hülkenberg in the Ferrari‑powered Sauber. Neither man found a positive angle. Neither man found an explanation.
“I really don’t,” Hamilton said when asked where the pace went. “It just started to fall away from us. The car is very, very tough to drive. It just fell away from us. I mean, eight‑tenths, that’s a mountain to climb.”
Leclerc wasn’t any brighter. “Honestly, my lap was clean in SQ3. I don’t regret much what I’ve done in my lap,” he said. “I don’t know, but it’s not enough. I mean, we are so far behind now. I’ll be very surprised if we found something that will make us such a jump. I hope I’m wrong. Unfortunately for now, it just seems like it’s the potential of our car.”
From the Sky F1 gantry, Danica Patrick didn’t bother sugar‑coating it. “They both seem defeated,” she said, capturing the mood that hung over Ferrari’s side of the paddock. “It’s total frustration and almost like, ‘Let’s just get this year over with.’”
For Hamilton, that sting is sharper. He traded silver for red to chase wins and a title run. Instead, the podium has stayed stubbornly out of reach while his former teammate George Russell has chalked up wins of his own. That gulf, as Patrick pointed out, turns a rough Friday into something heavier. “When you have a change like he had to go from Mercedes to a team where you think you’re going to go better, a lot of times that change can spark something. It’s just been such a disappointment.”
Jenson Button zoned in on the part that really unnerves drivers: surprise. “I think the biggest issue is that they’re just shocked by it,” he said. “In practice they were quick, and it’s fallen away from them. It’s trying to understand why the pace isn’t there. It’s not like they can go, ‘We know because we don’t have enough points of downforce.’ They don’t know why they’ve lost that pace and that’s the most frustrating thing.”
That unknown matters as much as the stopwatch. On a track Hamilton and Leclerc both tend to light up, Ferrari looked lost for feel — the car skittish on entry, unwilling to rotate without protest, and shy on traction when it counted. When a driver talks in generalities — “tough to drive,” “fell away from us” — it usually means they’re chasing a moving target rather than one fixable flaw.
There’s also the bigger picture nobody at Maranello is pretending to hide: 2026. Ferrari has long since redirected its main firepower to the sport’s sweeping reset next season — smaller, lighter cars with active aero and new power units. As one of the rare outfits that builds both the chassis and the engine, Ferrari knows the upside if it nails the regs. It also knows the cost of being half a step off.
Between now and then? Expect pragmatism over miracles. There are no silver bullets in the pipeline for the final run‑in after Austin, and everyone in red knows it. That’s why Friday’s tone in Texas felt so flat. When the only workable strategy is damage limitation, anonymous Saturdays become the job.
None of this means Hamilton and Leclerc won’t scrap for something meaningful this weekend — they will, because that’s muscle memory at this level. Austin’s Sprint and grand prix qualifying still offer room to tidy execution and grab cleaner track position. But even a crisp Saturday can’t disguise what’s shaping up as the theme of Ferrari’s 2025: a holding pattern with too many bumps.
Ferrari fans will default to the old refrain: next year. Only this time, there’s a credible case behind it. If Ferrari threads the needle on the 2026 regulations — and the team has the resources and the integration to do it — the payoff could be title‑level. That’s the promise that lured Hamilton in the first place. That’s the promise Leclerc re‑upped for.
For now, though, the task is uglier and simpler. Keep the shop floor motivated. Harvest points where the car allows. Avoid the doom loop that can creep in when results don’t match profiles. The body language in Austin said plenty. What Ferrari does with that feeling over the next five race weekends will say more.
