Over the winter break, Ferrari were widely regarded as favourites to challenge McLaren for this year’s title.
The Maranello team were arguably on par with McLaren at the end of 2024, thanks to a very effective development programme.
Because of last year’s momentum, Ferrari’s struggles with the SF-25 have come as something of a surprise.
With a quarter of the 2025 season complete, the window of opportunity for the Scuderia to recover is rapidly diminishing.
Ferrari have limited resources to develop
Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc were both frustrated at the end of last weekend’s Miami GP.
A perfect storm of pit-wall confusion and a lack of fundamental pace prevented Ferrari from fighting towards the front.
Even the Williams of Alex Albon was comfortably ahead of the SF-25’s, evidence of Ferrari’s poor start to the campaign.
Unlike Red Bull, Fred Vasseur’s team cannot say their car has shown any notable signs of potential or peak performance.
Across virtually all conditions and circuit types, the Italian outfit are lagging behind the other front-runners.
This will complicate the team’s development efforts, since there is no specific area where they can address the SF-25’s weaknesses.
At a more foundational level, Ferrari’s early-season upgrades have failed to deliver the improvements that were expected.
Like most teams, the first set of upgrades introduced in 2025 were actually planned at the end of 2025.
Because of this, the assumptions of Ferrari’s development with the SF-25 have to be revisited – creating uncertainty about their trajectory.
This brings into question whether the Maranello factory’s upcoming upgrades are capable of producing enough downforce to really put pressure on McLaren.
Beyond the reigning Champions, Red Bull and Mercedes have more upgrades in the pipeline.
Neither team introduced updates as quickly as Ferrari, which makes the performance of Vasseur’s team even more concerning.
Should Christian Horner and Toto Wolff’s team progress, they will be best-placed to capitalise on the potential for McLaren to regress after the FIA’s flexi-wing directive.
Vasseur looks forward
It was a little less than twelve months ago that Ferrari encountered their first hiccups with the SF-24.
An upgrade package brought to the Spanish GP, threw the car out of it’s ideal performance window – a misstep that Ferrari spent the next few months recovering from.
Indeed, the Scuderia did correct this mistake with its Monza updates.
Throughout this tricky period, Fred Vasseur was positive about the team’s trajectory for the season.
In a similar way, the Frenchman refuses to enter a panic after the SF-25’s underwhelming performance so far.
His reflections after the Miami GP are indicative of his perspective:
“We didn’t quite get the balance right this weekend, particularly yesterday in qualifying and then today we struggled in the middle of the group with little chance to secure a better result than this.
“When we were in free air, we were close to Mercedes and Red Bull in terms of pace.
“After a race like this there’s obviously a sense of frustration.
“But we need to stay focused and keep working hard in order to address the issues, dealing with our limitations step by step.
“On the strategy front, our calls were right.
“We pitted both our drivers under the Virtual Safety Car and this allowed Lewis to run behind Charles at the restart.
“Then we swapped the cars as soon as we were sure we were not putting Charles at risk from the cars behind.
“As Lewis was on Medium tyres and we wanted to try and catch Kimi Antonelli.
“It didn’t work, so we reversed the call at the end as per our standard procedure.”
