THE GAMBLE THAT BETRAYED FERRARI

We’ve reached the final stages of this Formula 1 World Championship. McLaren is preparing to celebrate its second consecutive Constructors’ title, Verstappen keeps capitalizing on every single opportunity, while Ferrari remains stuck in place: its season has been a carbon copy of the first half of the year, with no real progress but also no major setbacks. The SF-25 has proven to be a mediocre car—consistent in its results, yet never giving the impression of a genuine step forward.

It’s now clear to everyone what the real issue with this car is. It’s not about ride heights or other superficial explanations: the SF-25 is one of those projects that look brilliant on paper, with exceptional CFD simulation data and peak downforce values higher than in the past. But the track told a different story. From the very first laps in Bahrain, as soon as the car faced medium-to-slow corners, understeer became evident. Engineers worked to limit it, but the tendency has lingered, only slightly reduced, throughout the entire season.

The outcome is a car that’s competitive only in certain conditions: when the aero setup doesn’t need to be compromised too much, it can hold its own against Red Bull and Mercedes. But the moment a balance is required between low-speed grip and high-speed cornering, Ferrari shows its weakness. It happened in Jeddah’s opening corners, and again at Silverstone, in the chicane after Stowe. On top of that, the SF-25 struggles to generate enough load from the floor, a flaw that hurts on medium-to-low downforce circuits, where lighter wings become a necessity.

The updates introduced during the season—new floors, tweaks to the rear suspension—didn’t change the fundamentals, despite being hyped with big expectations. The real bottleneck remains the front suspension: it unlocked downforce levels that would have been hard to reach with the old design philosophy, but it introduced compromises Ferrari hasn’t been able to handle.

The problem is that Red Bull and McLaren had already been pursuing this path for years, gradually refining their systems. Ferrari, instead, tried to bridge the gap with a direct leap: moving the cockpit rearward, lengthening the nose, and adopting a new weight distribution, all without the know-how that rivals had accumulated. It was a risk perhaps understandable in 2023, when there was nothing to lose, but much more questionable this season, with only a year to go before the 2026 regulation overhaul.

Everyone in the paddock knows Ferrari runs as low as Red Bull and McLaren, but this rarely makes its way into the most popular channels, where vague commentary is preferred to keep the general audience entertained.

And so, discussions remain on a superficial level, without encouraging any critical or constructive analysis. A limitation that, in the long run, weighs not only on the quality of reporting, but also on the public’s ability to truly understand what’s happening on track.

© Simone Marchetti Cavalieri

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