There was a lot of excitement surrounding the Ferrari camp heading into 2025. Last season, they had lost the Constructors’ Championship to McLaren by just 14 points, and many believed they would finally overcome the hurdle to end their 17-year title drought. If not that, they were at least expected to compete for the crown as closely as they did last year. Alas, the first round of the season has cast doubt on those expectations.
After pre-season testing, Ferrari was tipped to be the fastest behind McLaren. So, heading into the Australian GP, they were one of the favorites to win. Sadly, their pace was too slow, with the Maranello-based outfit fielding what appeared to be the fourth-quickest car. Charles Leclerc finished P8 and Lewis Hamilton P10 — far from where they would have liked to be.
A thrilling race but it doesn’t end in our favour pic.twitter.com/aLGrdysRv3
— Scuderia Ferrari HP (@ScuderiaFerrari) March 16, 2025
It is still early days in the 2025 campaign, so Ferrari may recover to become one of the front-runners soon. But addressing the unfulfilled expectations in the season opener in Melbourne, Guenther Steiner criticized the team’s engineers.
On The Red Flags podcast, the hosts asked the ex-Haas boss whether Ferrari ‘screwed up over the winter’. And Steiner agreed.
“I think the development over the winter was not as good as they would have wanted it to be or as they thought it would be,” he said.
Steiner also insisted that it was not a setup issue as many had claimed it was. That’s an aspect that cannot magically make a car the fastest on the grid. “With the setup thing, you lose half-a-tenths but these guys [Ferrari engineers] are not dumb. They didn’t unlearn how to set up a car.”
“At Ferrari, it’s just a combination of things. They didn’t do what they anticipated to have done,” the Italian-American added.
Australia was a difficult outing for Hamilton and Leclerc. Not only was their pace not good enough to fight at the front, but there were issues with strategy and communication too. Hamilton, in particular, was struggling to communicate clearly with his race engineer Riccardo Adami, for which he has been advised to improve his tuning with Adami.
Team Principal Frederic Vasseur has insisted that the team has learned from the mistakes and heads into the Chinese GP with a renowned sense of optimism. “We’ll learn from this, but it’s not a problem,” the Frenchman said.
The Chinese GP will also be a sprint weekend, which will give Hamilton and Leclerc time to try out different setups in the shorter race on Saturday to understand the SF-25 better. Ferrari will be able to take notes and work on the car ahead of the Grand Prix.
Plus, the Red Bull, Mercedes, and McLaren crews are in a fix in Shanghai, with their cargo arriving more than two days late. As a result, they will have to work overnight, possibly without sleep, to get the garage and car assembled — potentially another area where Ferrari could have an advantage as the weekend kicks off.
