Vasseur rolls the dice: Ferrari’s rear-end rethink brings promise — and problems
Fred Vasseur looked edgy when Ferrari rolled into Spa. Not the usual Ardennes lottery nerves, but the kind you get when you bolt a new rear suspension onto a car that wasn’t designed for it and then throw it straight into a sprint weekend.
Ferrari’s long-anticipated rear suspension finally appeared at the Belgian Grand Prix and, on balance, it’s moved the SF-25 forward. Charles Leclerc grabbed a podium at Spa and then stunned McLaren with Ferrari’s first pole of the season in Hungary. The Sunday result in Budapest — fourth, thanks to an unexplained chassis issue — didn’t match the Saturday high, but the direction of travel is finally up.
Vasseur didn’t sugarcoat the compromise. “For us, it’s a step forward,” he told Auto Motor und Sport, before admitting the SF-25 wasn’t conceived to run this concept. “I would have liked to have done it earlier. However, such major changes in the middle of the season are never as efficient as those planned from the outset. The price is higher weight, aerodynamic losses and changes in driving dynamics. We built our car for a different type of suspension.”
That’s the crux. Ferrari has grafted on a fundamental piece of architecture mid‑campaign, trading purity for potential. Doing it at Spa, with just one practice session, only sharpened the risk. “When we brought the new rear axle to Spa, I was already nervous. It was a sprint weekend… That doesn’t leave much time for chassis set-up,” Vasseur said. “In the end, it worked out quite well. We used the sprint as a test.”
It needed to. 2025 hasn’t matched Ferrari’s 2024 surge, when they hounded McLaren all the way to Abu Dhabi. This season, McLaren has set the pace and, with 10 rounds left, Ferrari is still hunting a first win.
Lewis Hamilton, still waiting to truly light the touchpaper on his Ferrari stint, felt the step too. “Definitely some improvements that we’ve made on the upgrades,” he said after Hungary. “It’s a shame we’re not as competitive as the guys right at the front. But you’ve seen Charles just had a really strong run of the last two races. The car is definitely progressing, so we have to keep trying to extract more from it.”
That’s the assignment now: extract. The rear-end change has given Ferrari a broader set-up window and a clearer development path, but it’s also saddled the car with weight, aero trade-offs and a different balance profile. Vasseur’s gamble has bought momentum. Whether it buys a win before the season runs out is the part even he can’t simulate.
