Ferrari's problems are related to personnel changes.

      The Italian press reports that Ferrari's current problems, which are directly affecting the team's results this season, are linked to last year's personnel changes.

      In July of last year, Enrico Cardile, now the former technical director of Scuderia, signed a contract with Aston Martin F1, and it was under his leadership that conceptual decisions were made for the development of the SF-25 car.

      Cardile was placed on academic leave, which involved legal proceedings, and until his successor from Mercedes, Loïc Serra, took over, the team was in a state of reflection, according to Gazzetta dello Sport.

      For several months, until October 2024, the role of technical director was held by Frederik Vasseur, the team principal, who had to coordinate the work of various engineering departments. This was not an ideal solution, but at the time, there was no alternative. However, what is happening now echoes that very situation.

      A excerpt from Gazzetta states: "In practice, this meant that after the departure of the person coordinating all operations, until last spring, each of Scuderia's departments had to operate autonomously. The situation was far from ideal. The absence of a technical director during such a critical phase of chassis development and modernization could have caused many team issues…"

      For example, the decision to switch to a front suspension based on links was made even before Cardile left Maranello. However, such decisions should be implemented together with a whole set of other changes that need to be made to the chassis design and aerodynamic bodywork. Since this was not done, discrepancies emerged in the functioning of the suspension and aerodynamic platform.

      Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton immediately noticed this during preseason tests in Bahrain: the SF-25 behaved quite differently on track than predicted based on aerodynamic calculations and simulations.

      Part of the issue lies in the fact that a car's behavior with different ride heights is difficult to reproduce solely through virtual chassis models. This is a well-known problem, and for example, McLaren has long used a simple approach of bringing only one set of technical updates to each stage and testing the effectiveness of two chassis configurations during practice sessions. Moreover, along with this, active work is ongoing on the 2026 car, and such an approach also allows for an additional check of the correlation between calculations based on models and real-world track data.

      The difficult situation Ferrari found itself in inevitably affected the pace of SF-25 modernization, which is why Hamilton genuinely welcomed the updates finally introduced in June.

      At the Austrian round of the season, the red cars featured an updated floor, which enabled at least an improvement in qualifying performance. Although many issues with the SF-25 remain unresolved, some improvements in balance and aerodynamic stability have already been achieved. But this only happened now, after ten rounds of the championship…