Ferrari confirms worst-kept secret after season-defining Lewis Hamilton disqualification
Lewis Hamilton prepares for his Ferrari debut at the 2025 Australian Grand Prix
Fred Vasseur has confirmed that Ferrari was forced to raise the ride height of its F1 2025 car after Lewis Hamilton’s disqualification at the Chinese Grand Prix.
And he has admitted that the team “lost our way a bit” at the start of the season as it struggled with “quality issues” and execution on race weekends.
Fred Vasseur: Ferrari ‘lost out way a bit’ after Lewis Hamilton DSQ
After falling just 14 points short of champions McLaren in the 2024 Constructors’ title fight, Ferrari took the unusual step of changing its car concept for the final year of the current rules in F1 2025.
It emerged during the season-opening Australian Grand Prix weekend that Ferrari had been ‘shipwrecked’ by a fundamental issue with the car’s floor running too close to the ground.
Ferrari was caught out by the problem at the following weekend in China, where Hamilton was disqualified for excessive plank wear 24 hours after winning the sprint race from pole position.
Hamilton’s team-mate Charles Leclerc was also excluded in Shanghai after his car was found to be underweight.
Lewis Hamilton vs Charles Leclerc: Ferrari head-to-head scores for F1 2025
👉 F1 2025: Head-to-head qualifying statistics between team-mates
👉 F1 2025: Head-to-head race statistics between team-mates
It has been widely reported in the months since that Ferrari has been forced to compromise the car’s setup to manage its ride-height issues, with Hamilton and Leclerc instructed to lift and coast on the straights to guard against excessive wear.
It was hoped that a major rear-suspension upgrade (below), introduced at last month’s Belgian Grand Prix, would go some way to rectifying Ferrari’s issues and allow the team to access more of the car’s underlying performance.
However, Leclerc suffered a mysterious loss of pace – potentially caused by increased tyre pressures for the final stint in a bid to protect the floor – after claiming Ferrari’s first pole position of the season in Hungary earlier this month, suggesting that the problem remains unresolved.
Despite the team’s challenging start to the season, Ferrari occupy second place in the Constructors’ standings entering the final 10 races of the F1 2025 season, but trail McLaren by a massive 299 points ahead of next weekend’s Dutch Grand Prix.
Vasseur has confessed that Hamilton’s disqualification in China “threw” Ferrari off track, forcing the team to leave “a safety margin” with the car’s ride height to prevent a repeat.
Asked what Ferrari lack compared to McLaren this season, he told German publication Auto Motor und Sport: “McLaren is outstanding at tyre management, especially in wet or hot conditions.
“The disqualifications threw us off track a bit. We had to leave ourselves a safety margin in terms of ground clearance.
“As we all know, these cars are extremely sensitive when it comes to ground clearance. Every millimetre is a position on the starting grid.
“If you don’t have full control over the vehicle height, it affects the car’s competitiveness.
“To solve the problem, you lose focus on other things. Preparing the tyres for qualifying, the warm-up laps, you name it.”
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Vasseur went on to admit that “quality issues” have also hindered Ferrari’s season, with the team losing its way in the aftermath of the Chinese Grand Prix.
He added: “Over the last three or four weekends, we have been able to close the gap to two tenths.
“We had a lot of problems with the handling at the race track at the beginning of the season. There were quality issues, then the disqualifications.
“We lost our way a bit there.
“So much depends on the details and qualifying in Budapest was a good example. If you focus on the wrong things, you immediately lose a lot of ground.
“If Charles had been two tenths slower, he would have been sixth instead of first.
“It’s very difficult to know what’s important at any given moment in order to be fast.”
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