Ferrari is not giving up on the 2025 season yet.

      The 2025 season is shaping up for Ferrari in such a way that the team and its fans have nothing to be particularly happy about, and Maranello is trying to find answers to very serious questions about the SF-25 car.

      On the plus side: Lewis Hamilton's pole position in qualifying for the sprint and victory in Saturday's short race in Shanghai, as well as Charles Leclair's podium finish in the recent Saudi Arabian Grand Prix. But there are a lot more disadvantages – it's enough that this is the only podium of the Scuderia so far this year, although five stages have already been completed.

      On average, it turns out that the Ferrari car is only the fourth fastest in qualifying. But during the races, she was periodically capable of a good pace, which Leclair demonstrated in Bahrain and Jeddah, where he did not lose much to the leaders.

      "The most difficult thing to explain is the difference between the pace in qualifying and in the race," admitted Frederic Wasser, head of the Italian team. – I think in the last 35-40 laps of the race in Jeddah we were driving at the same pace as Max Verstappen.

      But the gap in qualifying is still large, and our people are now giving priority to this, because when you start from 4th position, you lose a few seconds in the first five or six laps. In general, in order to perform more consistently, we need to improve our qualifications."

      The qualifying gap is more pronounced in the case of Hamilton, who still has not found the right approach to the car, which is more consistent with Leclair's aggressive driving style.

      In Bahrain, the team presented its first set of upgrades this year, primarily an upgraded bottom. Due to this, the aerodynamic efficiency of the chassis as a whole should have increased, and in particular, downforce at high speeds should have increased.

      The new products fulfilled their task, but they were not aimed at correcting such a disadvantage of the SF-25 as the instability of the behavior of the rear of the car, which manifested itself already at the first stage of the season in Australia. In addition, almost all the updates that were presented in Bahrain were developed before the start of the season, and the team dealt with them more as planned than in response to the problems that appeared in the first races.

      Maranello believes that the car has potential, however, according to informed sources, the team is not preparing any serious innovations for the stages in Miami and Imola. But is it really possible to fix the weaknesses of this machine?

      The crux of the problem is that the Ferrari SF-25 is too finicky, its range of optimal settings is too narrow, so any adjustments to them, as well as changes in external conditions, disproportionately affect its effectiveness.

      It is more difficult for Hamilton to find an approach to the car than for his team-mate, and when he tries to counteract the unstable behavior of its rear part at the entrance to turns, tries to load the front wheels less, then in the middle phase of the turn, the manifestations of understeer begin.

      "I feel uncomfortable driving this car. My partner has been driving such cars for a long time, and I take turns slower than him," Lewis admitted during the weekend in Saudi Arabia.

      According to the British edition of The Race, the package of updates presented by Ferrari in Bahrain did not allow to fully rid the car of its main shortcomings. Some of the problems are mechanical in nature, and they are probably related to the geometry of the suspension and the weight distribution of the chassis, but mostly their causes should be sought in aerodynamics.  

      Loic Serra, the technical director in charge of the chassis, and Diego Tondi, the chief aerodynamics specialist, are currently focused on this, and they are primarily concerned with the underbody of the car.

      The SF-25 machine has to be adjusted to a fairly high ground clearance, otherwise increased wear of the control bar is possible. But as the ground clearance increases, downforce immediately decreases, and now Maranello is trying to find a solution that will maintain the optimal level of downforce while increasing ground clearance.

      Again, sources close to Scuderia believe that some encouraging results have already been obtained in the course of ongoing research in the wind tunnel and using CFD technologies. In general, no one in Maranello is panicking, they are not trying to develop any emergency or urgent measures, so the work is going according to plan, and a number of new products should be ready by the summer.

      All this allows us to conclude that Ferrari is not giving up on the current season yet, they are continuing to modernize the SF-25 chassis, and at the same time they are creating a car for 2026. This task is a priority for several special units of the team, which in January completely switched to the training program for the transition to a new generation of equipment.