Illegal Ferrari SF-25? Charles Leclerc responds to George Russell’s suspicions

Charles Leclerc isn’t bothered by George Russell’s suspicions that his Ferrari was borderline “illegal” at the Hungarian Grand Prix, as Ferrari’s issues with the SF-25 are a “lot more complex” than the Mercedes driver’s quip.

Although Leclerc lined up on pole position for the Hungarian Grand Prix, the team’s first grand prix P1 of the championship, and was in contention for the race win, he crossed the line in fourth place having lost pace in the final stint.

George Russell claimed Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari was ‘close to being illegal’

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

Leclerc had been in the hunt for the win when he came into the pits on lap 41 for his second and final stop, where Ferrari bolted on a set of the hard Pirelli tyres. His pace plummeted by two seconds per lap.

He let rip at the team, saying: “This is so incredibly frustrating. We’ve lost all competitiveness. You just have to listen to me. I would have found a different way of managing those issues.”

That led to speculation that Ferrari’s ride-height issue, which saw Lewis Hamilton disqualified from the Chinese Grand Prix, continued to impact the SF-25.

Amidst claims Ferrari had to increase the tyre pressure in Leclerc’s final stop to avoid a repeat scenario, Russell, who was the last driver to overtake the Monegasque driver and boot him off the podium, gave credence to that.

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“I saw how slow he was, so I presumed something was not right,” the Mercedes driver told Sky F1. “He’s not going to tell you that they’re close to being illegal.

“The only thing we can think of is they were running the car too low to the ground and they had to increase the tyre pressures for the last stint.”

The Briton, who is in a battle with Max Verstappen and Leclerc to join the McLaren team-mates on the F1 2025 season’s podium, reckons Ferrari even turned down Leclerc’s engine to counter the ride-height issue.

“[They] were using an engine mode that was making the engine slower at the end of the straight, which is where you have the most amount of plank wear,” he added. “That’s the only thing we can think of based upon the lap times and the engine mode they were running and stuff like that.”

But while Leclerc didn’t deny Russell’s claims, he said what was going on in Hungary was “more complex” than just ride-height issues.

“I’m not going to comment on that,” he told the media, including PlanetF1.com, when asked about Russell’s comment that his Ferrari was borderline illegal.

“I don’t really mind about what George said after the race.

“The situation is a lot more complex than what he portrayed, but I’m not really going to comment too much.

“And I think, as we’ve said after Budapest, we are not going to go into the details of exactly what happened, etc. It’s something that we are trying to fix and that we are all working towards.

“But yeah, the only thing I can say is that it’s a lot more complex than that.”

Although Leclerc and Ferrari head into the final 10 races of the season sitting P2 in the Constructors’ Championship while also being in the fight to finish third in the Drivers’ standings, F1 2025 has not panned out as Leclerc expected back in 2023.

Speaking at the 2023 edition of the Dutch Grand Prix, the driver predicted that no one would be able to challenge Red Bull before the new regulation cycle kicked in 2026.

McLaren, though, has not only challenged, it has surpassed Red Bull while Ferrari, expected to join the Woking team in kicking on this year, has fallen off the pace.

“I was clearly wrong,” Leclerc said of that 2023 predictions, “and that’s why I probably won’t be using the word impossible anymore. McLaren proved all of us wrong, I think they were the big surprise of this year.

“We all thought that we had done a step. We all thought that being the last year of those Formula One regulation, everybody will be closer, which was the case for Red Bull, Mercedes and ourselves.

“But McLaren seemed to have found something that we didn’t and fair play to them. They did an incredible job.

“Yeah, now it’s up to us to do a better job and try and catch them, but obviously now it’s kind of late. They’ve got quite a big, big advantage in the championship, and for this year is going to be hard, but we’ll keep focusing on trying to win races as soon as possible, and then we’ll think about the next year.”

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