Has Ferrari turned one of its car's key strengths into a weakness?

Life is a roller coaster at Ferrari at the moment – and not one that anybody in authority at the team, let alone the drivers, is keen to ride. The Miami Grand Prix weekend presented another China-style juxtaposition of high points in the sprint race (albeit fewer in number) with brutal lows at almost all other points.

Indeed – and at the risk of swapping metaphors as clumsily as Charles Leclerc crunched into the wall during his lap to the grid on Saturday – there was rather more red ink in the ledger than black.

Sprint qualifying, the first definitive measure of pure pace this weekend, ended with Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton sixth and seventh, and Leclerc over three tenths off pole. Hamilton, in contrast with previous weekends, was relatively close to his team-mate, just over two tenths adrift.

For both of them the obvious bogey corner was Turn 17, where the SF-25 looked understeery and lock-up prone as the drivers bled off the brakes and turned in. But it was also leaking time in the other slow corners, a trait only partially masked by it being among the fastest through the speed trap.

Saturday looked like it had reached a nadir as Leclerc, inexplicably travelling to the sprint grid on intermediates rather than, as is the custom, full wets, smote the barrier with messy consequences. If he was not upbraided by team principal Frederic Vasseur for this, the stewards surely did, for he was issued with an official reprimand for attempting to drive what was left of his car back to the pits, scattering debris in his wake.

Hamilton’s third-place finish in the sprint itself was an outlier, albeit one that afforded Lewis a rare chance this year to smile and be positive when interviewed afterwards. And yet the fact is more than a little element of luck was involved: quickly tiring of his car’s terrible pace on the intermediates, he made an early call for slicks on a drying track.

Leclerc's sprint on Saturday in Miami was derailed early

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

As it happened, those still on intermediates were stuck in lap time stasis by chronic wear on the front-right tyres, so going early for slicks worked out unexpectedly well. Those who pontificate about strategy without actually understanding it therefore heaped great praise on the “great strategy” whereas it was simply a gamble, made in desperation.

Thereafter misery returned to prevalence in the Ferrari sphere as Leclerc qualified eighth for the grand prix and Hamilton was eliminated in Q2 on his way to 12th, Ferrari’s worst combined qualifying result of the year. The only upside was that, at the point of elimination, Hamilton was but a few hundredths of a second off Leclerc and hadn’t even used a new set of tyres.

When Hamilton is angry – with himself as much as his car – he is disinclined to wax lyrical in public. But Leclerc was explicit about the car’s shortcomings: simply put, what he and Hamilton were achieving represented the limit of the SF-25’s performance at this circuit.

“Just to get into Q3 is tough for us at the moment” Lewis Hamilton

“It shows the potential of the car is just not there,” said Leclerc. “When I finish a lap, again today in qualifying, I feel very satisfied with my lap, but it's only bringing us whatever it is – P8 or something.

“So, we've got to look at it. I think a track like this also highlights our weaknesses - there's a lot of low-speed content, both Williams are in front of us, and I consider my lap a good one, so I think it's pretty easy to understand where we are lacking.”
 
What appeared most baffling to Leclerc was the way he – as he put it – “was completely out of the window of the car for some reason” in Q1 and had to make unplanned set-up changes to get the car where he wanted it to be for subsequent sessions. Shunting it just a couple of hours earlier will not have helped, of course.

“We'll keep trying,” Hamilton said to Sky TV after qualifying. “We're only six races in but we're struggling big time.

Hamilton is struggling to hide his early-season emotions

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

“We're trying our hardest not to make big set-up changes, but no matter what we do it's so inconsistent every time we go out. We've got problems with brakes, we've got problems with that instability we're struggling with. We're just generally not quick enough.

“Just to get through, to get into Q3 is tough for us at the moment. And you're then on that back foot – it's hard to pick up those points.

“It is what it is and I just keep trying. I'll be back at the factory next week and just keep going.”

Ferrari fitted a new floor in Bahrain, but the mood music from the drivers hasn’t been overly positive about its benefits. Whether it has enabled the SF-25 to run effectively at slightly higher ride heights – being too low was what led to Hamilton’s disqualification in the Chinese GP after winning the sprint there – is yet to be seen.

“Whatever we do with the car, we can run it in different ways,” was all Leclerc would concede, “but we just don't have the downforce the others have at the moment, especially at low speed.”

So, work to be done there. Work, too, on getting Hamilton accustomed to the Brembo brakes and the Ferrari power unit’s engine-braking characteristics.

Ferrari's SF-25 and Hamilton are not yet fully in tune

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

And, just as troublingly, there is some distance to go on the operational front. Leclerc said this of going to the grid on inters: “We need to understand what we've done wrong as a team, but obviously I think this was the main mistake that then cost us a lot.”

Hamilton, for his part, thought it was pointless to focus on saving tyres at a stage in Q2 when it was a struggle to make the Q3 cut. “It doesn’t make sense” was his verdict.

“We need some upgrades, we need some improvements,” he said. “We've got lots of things that need to be better.”

“Have a tea break while you're at it” Lewis Hamilton over the radio

Worse was to come in the grand prix, where Hamilton spent much of the first stint on hard tyres bottled up behind Esteban Ocon’s Ferrari-powered Haas. Likewise the spectacle of former Ferrari pilot Carlos Sainz, in a Williams, overtaking Leclerc is unlikely to make it onto the Scuderia’s post-season ‘sizzle reel’.

Having restored some honour by dispatching Sainz, the Ferrari drivers then became entangled in protracted negotiations with the pitwall over who should be running first on track, as Hamilton eventually won an argument that he should be let by because otherwise he was just wasting the potential pace advantage of running on mediums in his second stint. “Have a tea break while you’re at it,” he huffed over the team radio. 

He was eventually prevailed upon to give the position back, but only after some internal confusion over when he had been told to do so. Little wonder that Leclerc was glum and tight-lipped in the ‘pen’ after the race, returning to a theme expounded by his team-mate a day earlier.

“As a team we need to do better, and today was proof of that,” he opined.

How many more times will we hear a variation of that phrase this season?

The drivers want better decision-making from the team

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Motorsport Images