Explained: The biggest limitation of Ferrari’s 2025 F1 car

Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur has revealed the biggest limitation hampering their 2025 F1 car.

F1’s most iconic and successful team have endured a woeful start to the new campaign with their lack of competitiveness leaving Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc hugely frustrated.

Leclerc and Hamilton could only finish seventh and eighth at the Miami Grand Prix after qualifying eighth and 12th respectively, marking the team’s worst qualifying result of the season so far.

According to Vasseur, that is down to Ferrari’s SF-25 car struggling to get the best out of new tyres over a single lap.

“If you don’t consider the quali, we lost the weekend of the maximum of points since yesterday in quali,” Vasseur told media including Crash.net after Sunday’s race in Miami.

“Yesterday in quali our fastest lap with the two cars was with scrubbed and not with new. We were not able to get the potential of the new tyres.

“The lap that we did in scrubbed was not that bad. It was probably P4, P5. But when the others put a new set [on] we lost the 4-5 position.

“Clearly it’s where we have to improve, if you have a look at the global picture of the weekend. It’s where we have to improve to get the best from the new tyres and to do a step forward.

“I think the pace today is always difficult when you are stuck in the pack. But the pace today was probably matching with Red Bull and Mercedes.

“I think McLaren was on another planet today. We never said that we could have fought with McLaren. But with a better position we agreed to fight with Max and Mercedes.”

Getting on top of tyres key for Ferrari 

Asked why Ferrari struggled with tyres in Miami, Vasseur said: "That's a good question. If I knew the answer, I would do a step forward and we would have fixed it between Q2 and Q3.

"You always have to operate the tyres in a very narrow window. It's different from track to track, it's different from compound to compound, from track temp to track temp.

“And it's always after the session that you say, 'OK, I could have done differently.’

“I think we were able to do a better job the last two or three events, even if the quali was always not our best session.

“But yesterday was, from far, the worst of the season in terms of pure quali, because we didn’t at all extract the potential of the tyres.

“If you have a look, everybody improved five or six tenths between scrubbed to new, and we lost two or three tenths.”