The new AR article is just a reiteration of what they said in their last stream, but I will share it for people who missed it.
The SF-25 has not delivered the expected responses, and problems have emerged that Loic Serra and his team are trying to fix. The car has shown flashes of excellent potential — but only intermittently. In this sense, Miami will be a crucial stop for the Scuderia, seeking further positive signals while awaiting future developments.
The SF-24 had trouble heating the tires, starting the lap with a delay already in hand. This year, the sensations are similar but the situation slightly different: the SF-25 has a weak rear and an imperfect, variable balance, stemming from a ride height above its optimal operating window. Rear-end stiffness problems, already reported, along with related aerodynamic issues, are limiting the SF-25 with a domino effect. Right now the engineers have a short blanket, and the setup is always a compromise between slow, medium, and fast corners. In Jeddah, they chose to favor fast corners, sacrificing performance in slow ones — and in qualifying, this loss amplified, especially in Sector 1.
The new floor helped: compared to Suzuka (a similar track to Jeddah), Ferrari lost more in the slow corners (due to setup choices and qualifying issues) compared to McLaren but gained on the straights and in medium-speed corners, reducing the high-speed deficit with a roughly one-tenth improvement, as expected.
The qualifying problems are tied to the lack of grip and downforce that strain the SF-25 when running Softs. All these issues trace back to one root cause: ride height. Lowering the car would bring downforce, grip, and performance. As Loic Serra said early in the year: “When you shift something in these cars, you inevitably influence everything else.” Every adjustment triggers a ripple effect, for better or worse. The floor introduced in Bahrain wasn’t meant to fix problems only discovered later — it had been in development since winter. At Maranello, they are working on solutions aimed at unlocking that famous hidden potential, although nothing major is expected yet for Imola.
Every driver would prefer a perfect or at least well-balanced car, but that's a rare luxury. Leclerc favors a weaker rear but razor-sharp front — just like with the F1-75 and now with the SF-25. As was said before Bahrain testing, the engineers designed a car with a strong front end but underestimated how unstable the rear would be. Leclerc carved out a setup path that’s building his confidence and letting him extract more performance, while Hamilton is lost.
“At the moment, Hamilton can’t feel the rear end — it doesn’t give him trust. When he brakes or turns in, he’s lacking the confidence in how the rear will behave, making him brake earlier, slower at mid-corner, and struggling even on throttle exit, with a rear end that just isn’t solid enough,” Matteo Bobbi analyzed for us during the last AutoRacer live stream on Twitch. “It’s a technical issue,” Bobbi emphasized, laying the responsibility squarely on Ferrari to improve the SF-25.
“A stronger rear wouldn’t hurt Leclerc either,” he added pointedly. Lewis Hamilton struggles; Charles Leclerc gives his all but doesn’t have the machinery needed to fight the others. Upgrades that limit or even erase the current SF-25’s flaws would benefit both Ferrari drivers, not just Hamilton.
