After just two rounds of the 2025 season, Ferrari finds itself 61 points behind McLaren, who have carried over their dominant form from last year’s title-winning campaign to lead the Constructors’ standings. So far, the Italian outfit has been nowhere near contending for race wins like McLaren.
However, this brings back memories of the 2024 season, when Red Bull started as a dominant force with consecutive 1-2 finishes in the opening rounds. Yet, as the season progressed, their performance faded relative to McLaren and Ferrari. Frederic Vasseur believes the same could happen to the Woking-based team in 2025.
While Ferrari’s team principal will be deeply disappointed by their lack of contention for wins so far, he remains hopeful of staging a comeback—just as they did against Red Bull last year.
While drawing parallels between Red Bull’s early dominance in 2024 and McLaren’s current position, Vasseur hinted that McLaren could also falter as the season progresses. “If we went back to the press conference after the second race last year, you’d probably have asked me, ‘Do you think they will be champions by June?’”
Of course, Red Bull’s form started faltering in June 2024 and by September, they lost their lead in the Constructors’ standings. With a long season of 24 races, Vasseur feels that the current pecking order has to be taken with a pinch of salt”.
“They [McLaren] are in good shape, they are going well, the pace is strong, that’s clear. And I think they are a step forward, but it’s not the end of the championship,” the Frenchman added per AutoRacer.
That was McLaren’s 50th 1-2 finish in F1 pic.twitter.com/ZROUBrzE5b
— Autosport (@autosport) March 23, 2025
Vasseur remains optimistic about Ferrari’s chances, aiming to bring the SF-25 into the fight as development progresses in the coming races. Moreover, he believes the performance gap to McLaren is smaller than what they faced against Red Bull last year. Following the Chinese GP, Charles Leclerc stated that Ferrari is “three-tenths” off McLaren.
How Ferrari’s weekend unraveled
After Lewis Hamilton’s Sprint victory in China, there was a wave of enthusiasm in the Ferrari garage. However, it all came crashing down as soon as qualifying began. The best he and Leclerc could do that session was P5 and P6 respectively.
Hamilton revealed after the race on Sunday that they lost performance owing to some of the changes they made on the SF-25 between the sprint race and the Grand Prix qualifying.
“We started really optimistic but we made a couple of changes and it really put the car on a knife edge. The wind picked up a bit as well, so the car was trickier to drive and harder to put laps together,” he said in his post-qualifying interview.
In the race, Hamilton struggled to match the front-runners’ pace and fell further back after opting for a two-stop strategy, ultimately finishing sixth. Meanwhile, Leclerc—despite running a one-stop strategy and carrying front-wing damage—surprisingly displayed strong pace.
However, even he couldn’t break into the top three, ultimately finishing fifth after Max Verstappen’s brilliant late-race overtake.
Verstappen Leclerc
Max gets by with a mega move but Charles fought back hard #F1 #ChineseGP pic.twitter.com/2Z0AU9loNf
— Formula 1 (@F1) March 23, 2025
To make matters worse, Hamilton and Leclerc’s points from the race were nullified as they were disqualified due to infringements on their respective cars. This dropped Ferrari to P5 in the Constructors’ standings, behind Williams.
Ferrari’s first task will be to analyze how Leclerc managed to be quicker despite his front-wing damage. More importantly, they must focus on closing the gap to McLaren before falling too far behind in the Constructors’ Championship.
