Is Ferrari's revolution closing the gap to Red Bull?
While Ferrari's 1-2 in Australia is unlikely to indicate an immediate title-drought-ending resurgence, the sense that tides are turning at the Italian squad is compelling as it seeks to put up a more regular challenge to Red Bull in Formula 1.
Jake Boxall-Legge
Published:
Unless Carlos Sainz’s victory at the Australian Grand Prix is the catalyst for a seismic shift in Formula 1’s competitive order, Ferrari will likely match its longest streak without a title at the end of 2024. Sixteen lean years passed between the Prancing Horse’s constructors’ championship trophies in 1983 and 1999, and this remains its biggest drought. But the teams’ title win in 2008 moves ever further away with the passage of time, the fading fingerprints of that year’s success only recently refreshed by Felipe Massa’s legal action against the FIA.
In seasons past, Ferrari’s failure to add to its tally of championships was often traced to the team itself. After the Jean Todt era, the group that had been instrumental in securing successive titles slowly began to disband. Ross Brawn left at the end of 2006, as did engine lead Paolo Martinelli. Chief designer Rory Byrne, the only man who could give Adrian Newey a run for his money in the early 2000s, wound down his involvement with the team on a consultancy basis until 2009. After 2008, the team looked markedly different to that which had conquered all before it only a few years before.
Over the next decade and a half, Ferrari became typecast as a team that couldn’t string a race strategy together and sometimes had the propensity to build poor cars. The F60 of 2009 was an example of the latter point, where the team had sunk so much time and resource into its fierce battle with McLaren over 2008 that it had underestimated the scale of the new aerodynamic rules.
The fumbling of the drivers’ crown in the 2010 Abu Dhabi GP with Fernando Alonso was a strategic miscue, and many of the cars thereafter were only fit to win a couple of races per year. It had only really got close to a title in 2012, 2017, and 2018, but Ferrari was needlessly wasteful with race-winning cars. Titles are won with perfection in modern F1.
But the times, they are a-changin’. Ferrari appears to be genuinely in the ascendancy once again. Ambition now tangibly oozes from its pores, instead of the cold sweat of apathy that had plagued so many of its seasons. There’s a key figure responsible for that shift in mindset, one who hopes to break Ferrari’s title-less streak and restore the Maranello marque to the forefront of F1.
The Vasseur effect
Golden era under Jean Todt was based on long-term planning – Vasseur has a similar vision
Photo by: Shameem Fahath
Lewis Hamilton, who shocked the world with the announcement of his move to Ferrari in 2025, was open about the lure of joining team principal Fred Vasseur. The two had been successful together in the junior categories through Vasseur’s ASM Formula 3 team and his ART squad in GP2, but there’s more to Hamilton’s decision than simply opting for a neat bookend to his career.
Vasseur’s leadership evokes memories of Todt’s time as steward, not because of their shared nationality, but in taking a team starved of success and bringing in the right people to end the lengthy dry spell. Like Todt’s vision when he joined Ferrari in 1993, Vasseur’s project is a long-term one, but the executives still want to see tangible results along the way to justify their decision. Its performance in Australia, a first 1-2 finish in two years, is just one such sign of improvement.
Ferrari needs the Vasseur era to work, having been through a few different custodians on the pitwall post-Todt. His successor Stefano Domenicali, now F1’s CEO, strived to replicate Todt’s successes (and very nearly did in 2010 and 2012), but fell on his own sword after Ferrari’s poor start to the 2014 turbo-hybrid rules. Marco Mattiacci was a mere stopgap after Domenicali’s departure, prior to the signing of Maurizio Arrivabene, who had prior ties to the team as a Philip Morris executive.
"Fred has been very clear on which directions to take and for now it has paid off"
Charles Leclerc
While Arrivabene almost steered the team to titles in 2017 and 2018 despite the might of Mercedes, a culture of fear started to erode at Maranello from within. This led to the promotion of technical director Mattia Binotto, who restored a sense of creativity to the design rooms – but also had to oversee Ferrari’s recovery from an FIA technical directive that coincided with a drop in powertrain performance. Under Binotto, Ferrari also gained a reputation for tactical blunders, particularly in 2022 when it failed to make the most of its early competitive advantage.
Vasseur was tasked with eliminating the perception that Ferrari was a soft target. Unlike most of his predecessors, he had experience running an F1 team. Domenicali was Ferrari’s long-time sporting director, Arrivabene was from a marketing and sales background, and Binotto was promoted from the technical department. Although the likes of Andrea Stella and James Vowles have proved that you don’t need experience in running a race team to do so successfully, Vasseur nonetheless has decades of knowhow to fall back on.
Charles Leclerc, who has driven for Vasseur in GP3 and at Sauber, knows the good-humoured Frenchman better than most. He reckons that Ferrari has become a much more focused operation under new management, with Vasseur able to distill the most vital areas of improvement into a handful of key points over a weekend.
“I think what’s really important for Fred is to have very clear ideas and to help the team to choose what are the main areas we need to work on,” Leclerc offers. “When you look at the weekend, there’s a thousand things that you could have optimised.
Ferrari is more focused with Vasseur at the helm, Leclerc believes
Photo by: Ferrari
“But then you obviously need to make it clear that these are the top three things that we need to focus on, and that there are not 20 of them in order to have all the people on board pushing for the same thing. And I think on that, Fred has been very clear on which directions to take and for now it has paid off.”
If Vasseur’s presence was enough of a pull to draw Hamilton to the team, then it may be enough to tempt more big-hitters in F1 to enlist. Vasseur won’t necessarily care where new staff come from, just as long as they’re among the best. If, however, any of Red Bull’s technical staff become unsettled by the team’s ongoing power struggle, Ferrari might sense an opportunity to weaken its main rival.
How the numbers stack up
“It’s not [just] a feeling,” Vasseur states on whether Ferrari had made strides into Red Bull’s advantage over the winter. “Last year in Jeddah, in the race, we were something like one second off. And this season, we are perhaps four tenths. For sure, we are much closer to Red Bull than one year ago, but we are still behind. The business is to be first, it’s not to be second and not too far away.”
Versus its start to 2022, when Ferrari briefly looked like a genuine challenger for Red Bull before its performance ebbed away, 2023 did not begin quite as well. Although its qualifying pace proved to be a match for Red Bull’s on occasion, both Mercedes and Aston Martin appeared to have moved ahead in the race performance stakes. McLaren later posed a more concerted challenge too when its upgrades started to bear fruit, but Ferrari began to make headway with its own car.
Set-up discoveries over the summer led to a noticeable performance upswing at Zandvoort and Monza, later yielding its sole victory of the season in Singapore. This was later underpinned by a new floor brought to September’s Japanese GP, which ensured that Ferrari could put Mercedes under pressure for second in the constructors’ championship. Ferrari’s 2023 can thus be broken into three acts: the first half of the year, post-summer, and its end-of-season crescendo.
How do those acts compare with its opening three races of 2024? Using the supertimes metric, which expresses the fastest lap each team sets during a grand prix event as a percentage of the outright best lap, this can demonstrate the relative performance of each car. Ferrari’s average supertimes for the opening three races of 2023, the races after the summer break (Monza, Singapore, and Suzuka, given Zandvoort was rain-affected), and the last three races, are compared below with those for the first three 2024 races.
| Year | Races | Gap |
| 2023 | Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Australia | 100.401% |
| 2023 | Italy, Singapore, Japan | 100.249% |
| 2023 | Brazil, Las Vegas, Abu Dhabi | 100.167% |
| 2024 | Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Australia | 100.240% |
The direct comparison of the opening races of 2023 to those of 2024 demonstrates a clear improvement in pace relative to Red Bull by 0.161% which, given the championship winners’ own refinements over the winter, could denote the 0.6-second inroads that Vasseur estimates Ferrari has made.
Ferrari is closer to Red Bull in the pace stakes than it was 12 months ago, and its rate of development over 2023 gives encouragement it can continue that progress
Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images
Although the numbers comparing the end of 2023 to the start of 2024 suggest that Ferrari has regressed in its pursuit of developing F1’s fastest car, the small sample sizes do have their limitations. Last year’s Las Vegas race gave Ferrari a very clear edge (approximately 0.4%) in one-lap pace over Red Bull, although this was not something that Leclerc could quite convert into victory.
In the prior trio of races, Ferrari had the fastest car over the weekend in Italy and Singapore. There were multiple instances over the second half of 2023 where Ferrari sat atop the supertime rankings, thanks to the breakthroughs it had made over the season.
Yet, it could rarely challenge Red Bull for victories, and this was courtesy of a crucial race-day disadvantage. It became apparent through 2022, when Leclerc briefly looked to be a title contender, that Ferrari fell short in the tyre management stakes against Red Bull.
"This year, it’s much easier I think to read [tyres] for them, to know where is the limit and to stay just a bit below"
Fred Vasseur
Max Verstappen snowballed that over the middle portion of the year into a key advantage, denying Leclerc a chance to notch up another win after the Austrian GP. It was a weakness that persisted into 2023, costing Ferrari more chances to convert its latent qualifying pace into headline results. Now it seems to have got the balance right.
Understanding the tyres
There’s a cliche about tyre management in F1 being a ‘black art’. Building up a picture of Pirelli’s current construction is nowhere near as obtuse as it perhaps was in 2012 with high-degradation tyres, but understanding any race tyre offers huge amounts in performance rewards. There’s a reason why teams spend millions developing their own tyre models covering everything from grip, slip and expected degradation patterns.
Ferrari didn’t have a particularly good handle on this over 2022 and 2023. Its performance on tyres in the early rounds of 2022 was probably masked by Red Bull’s weight issues which, when fixed, gave Verstappen an edge and critically exposed Ferrari’s weaknesses.
The 2023 Ferrari was a development of its predecessor and the tyre management deficiencies remained present, but it also yielded a breakthrough in that department. These improvements appeared to have their genesis in the floor that Ferrari took to Suzuka in September; Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin hinted that the SF-23’s new floor had coincided with Mercedes losing its edge in race day tyre management. The development of that floor has continued into the SF-24.
The SF-24 Ferrari appears to be better at managing its tyres in race-trim
Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / Motorsport Images
Vasseur postulates that it was the capriciousness of the SF-23 in the hands of the drivers that was the main factor behind Ferrari’s inability to preserve its performance on race day. As the drivers tried to compensate, he suggested, this caused them to take more out of the tyres.
“What is true is that last year, the main issue was the fact that the car was very difficult to drive into the race, then you had to do a step [in the pace], doing mistakes, damaging the tyres,” recalls Vasseur. “And then it’s kind of a negative spiral.
“This year, it’s much easier I think to read for them, to know where is the limit and to stay just a bit below. And when you have to manage tyres, it’s much easier and they are much more under control than they were last year, when they were a bit in ‘survival mode’ and by this you are killing the tyres quite quickly.
“Where we made a huge step I think it’s more on the consistency between the two compounds between one stint and the other one. The car is much easier to drive; much easier to read for our drivers, much easier to develop, and it’s probably the biggest step that we did compared to last year, at least to have a good read of the car quite early into the weekend.”
Leclerc reckons that Ferrari has now been able to demonstrate something approaching equality with Red Bull in the tyre degradation stakes.
“There’s still more work to be done on that,” he remarked after the Jeddah round. “But what we are lacking at the moment, I wouldn’t say it’s tyre degradation. It’s more overall pace. Whenever we put the car in high fuel, we are losing more than what a Red Bull loses, more than the actual tyre degradation, which I think was more or less line-on-line in those past races.”
Is Leclerc on Verstappen’s level?
There’s one trait that Leclerc and Verstappen share: absolute fearlessness on a qualifying lap. Even though Verstappen has been the class of the field over the past few seasons, Leclerc has probably been the more impressive of the two in the single-lap stakes. The struggles in tyre management have rather restricted his performance in the races but, in the right car, Leclerc is capable of putting together excellent races.
Leclerc has yet to have a car in F1 that would allow him to challenge for the title over a full season, such was Red Bull's superiority by the end of 2022
Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images
Leclerc’s growth as a driver was accelerated after the 2019 Austrian GP, when he battled with Verstappen for the race win. The Dutchman, in his uncompromising pass for victory on the 69th lap that put the Ferrari driver off the road, exposed Leclerc’s weaker underbelly.
To his credit, Leclerc toughened up and, in his battles against Lewis Hamilton in both the Belgian and Italian races that year, showed renewed vigour in his retention of the lead. He then returned the favour over Verstappen in 2022’s edition of the Red Bull Ring race, passing him multiple times through a back-and-forth pit strategy battle.
There are two key questions over Leclerc: can he stamp out the mistakes, and can he maintain that learned steeliness over a season should he emerge in a title fight? His propensity to fling the car into the wall has reduced significantly over the years, and errors in 2023 were largely car-dependent.
With Vasseur’s guidance and Hamilton in the fold from next season, Leclerc can begin to add the tools required to win an F1 title to his arsenal
The SF-23 was a flighty car. In qualifying, Leclerc occasionally strayed over its limits of adhesion, although the improvements to it made that increasingly rare. In races on full tanks, the car was unpredictable, especially in changing wind conditions. A more predictable base in 2024 has largely given Leclerc much more room to manoeuvre, although he admitted to struggling with balance relative to Sainz last time out in Australia.
The jury remains out on his presence over a full season as a title contender. The 2022 campaign started well, but Red Bull’s growing momentum was far too difficult for Ferrari to overcome. But he’s won titles before in the junior categories, his back-to-back wins in GP3 and F2 in 2016 and 2017 demonstrating his ability to manage races.
With Vasseur’s guidance and Hamilton in the fold from next season, Leclerc can begin to add the tools required to win an F1 title to his arsenal. In that event, should Ferrari continue upon its current trajectory and deliver a championship-contending car in the next few years, Ferrari won’t need to break the bank to sign a Verstappen. It’ll already have its own star capable of reaching F1’s greatest heights.
In Leclerc Ferrari has a driver for the long term it can base the company's hopes on
Photo by: Mark Horsburgh / Motorsport Images
Was taking Hamilton over Sainz the right call?
When you have an opportunity to sign a seven-time world champion, it’s a decision that a team principal would usually make in a heartbeat. Lewis Hamilton’s call to leave Mercedes after a two-decade-plus association with the German marque to join Ferrari sent shockwaves through Formula 1, leaving Carlos Sainz without a drive. Despite his closeness to Charles Leclerc in the performance stakes over their three seasons as team-mates, you’d take Hamilton over Sainz, right?
After the Spaniard’s heroics in Melbourne, the choice perhaps looks a bit less compelling. Recovering from appendix surgery to race in F1 two weeks later was already a herculean feat, his abdominal scar having barely healed and with little opportunity to train in the lead-up to the Australian round. To come away with a victory thanks to a superbly managed race meant that Sainz earned every single plaudit he accrued on the Sunday afternoon.
In the meantime, Hamilton had floundered in Australia and was dumped out in Q2, and slow progress through the opening 16 laps ended with an engine problem. Mercedes’ struggles with its new W15 have been well documented as it attempts to understand its all-new chassis, but it seems that Hamilton is finding it much harder than team-mate George Russell to get a tune out of it.
There are two ways that this could be construed: either Hamilton’s depreciation so far in 2024 is a result of the current Mercedes, and a drop in motivation as a result of this, or his abilities have genuinely started to wane. It’ll only be clear in 2025 whether Hamilton can return to the front when he joins Ferrari, since it’s evident that he won’t be challenging for honours in the current season.
Ferrari knows what it would get if it had retained Sainz; his cerebral approach to grands prix has become a much-lauded quality over the past couple of years, something that has largely compensated for his outright pace shortfall relative to Leclerc. Their pairing has been a fine double-act, but Ferrari felt that it was time to move on.
As a free agent, Sainz is at his peak and will command a number of suitors for 2025. Ferrari will miss his tactical mind and his technical feedback, but rolling the dice on Hamilton offers its own benefits. Leclerc can also test himself against one of the best in the same equipment, something that the five-time race winner will certainly benefit from in his development as a potential superstar.
Hamilton will join Leclerc at Ferrari for 2025 while Sainz will have to look elsewhere
Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images
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