Ferrari's double disqualification for technical infringements in Formula 1’s Chinese Grand Prix was unprecedented - the team has never suffered such a fate in its long history.
But while Ferrari put its hand up to admit that Lewis Hamilton’s too worn plank was down to a set-up misjudgement in running his car too low, its post-race statement said responsibility was different when it came to Charles Leclerc’s car being underweight.
"Charles was on a one-stop strategy today and this meant his tyre wear was very high, causing the car to be underweight," explained Ferrari.
The focus on tyres being the cause is interesting because it mirrors the circumstance and initial suspicions about George Russell’s exclusion from victory at last year’s Belgian Grand Prix.
Russell’s Mercedes was found to be underweight after running an unplanned one-stopper – with his car ending up 1.5kg under the limit.
Initial blame for that revolved around higher-than-expected tyre wear, which was exacerbated by the fact that the Belgian race does not have a cooldown lap where drivers can pick up rubber marbles to increase mass.
In the end, Mercedes’ final conclusions were that tyre wear was actually just one of several factors that contributed. A worn-down plank and Russell’s own body weight also played their part.
So is Leclerc’s situation different and it is all down to tyres? Or do the numbers suggest there may be some other elements at play beyond Ferrari being caught out by wear being so much greater than anticipated?
The FIA measurements
Leclerc’s disqualification from the Chinese Grand Prix was the result of his car being one kilogramme under the minimum weight limit of 800kg including driver but without fuel.
This 800kg level is up from 798kg last year, and was adjusted to primarily accommodate a higher minimum driver weight limit of 82kg.
According to FIA documents, Leclerc’s car was weighed after returning to the pits (with his recovered endplate) and it hit the 800kg limit.
Furthermore, due to a damaged front wing on the Ferrari that meant the car was not in its original configuration, the car was then reweighed with an official spare front wing (which has to weigh exactly the same), and it was measured at 800.5kg.
The FIA revealed that the spare front wing was 200g heavier than the damaged version Leclerc had raced with.
After this initial weigh-in, the fuel was pumped out of the car (minimum weight has to be without fuel) and two litres of petrol were removed.
The car was again reweighed (with the spare wing in place) and its weight came in at 799kg – one kilogramme under the limit.
Alpine’s Pierre Gasly faced a similar situation – with his car being weighed after the race at 800kg. With 1.1kg of fuel (NB, unlike for Leclerc, FIA documents put this as mass rather than volume) being taken out, he too ended up at the same 799kg.
The missing kilogramme
Ferrari’s assertion that tyre wear was to blame for Leclerc’s missing kilogramme would suggest that it was caught out by a much higher than anticipated loss of rubber.
As part of a team’s normal pre-race calculations for the minimum weight the cars need to be at the flag, it will take into account how much rubber the tyres will lose as they wear down.
As Pirelli’s director of motorsport Mario Isola said last year: "Each track is different, each situation is different, and the wear is not linear. It depends how much you push, and it depends if your balance is perfect, because then you would wear all four tyres."
For the Chinese Grand Prix, team calculations primarily focused on a two-stop race – with a short final stint where the tyres would not wear excessively.
But things did not turn out that way, as the improved track conditions and a pretty performant C2 hard tyre meant a one-stop suddenly came into the frame.
And that meant running an extra-long second stint – where the tyres would be worn down to a greater extent.
Uncertainty about the wear profiles were also increased by the fact that the revised C2 was being run for the first time in a grand prix.
Teams (including Ferrari) had given it some mileage in pre-season testing in Bahrain, but as it was not one of the options in Australia, the first time they bolted it on to their cars in China (because of the circumstances of the sprint race) was in the grand prix itself.
Furthermore, as Isola revealed on Sunday night, out of all the new revised compounds for 2025, it is the one that is most different to last year.
"When evaluating C2 behaviour, one should bear in mind that it is the compound that has undergone the biggest changes of any in the 2025 range and therefore was something of an unknown quantity for all the teams," he said.
However, the unique circumstances of the Chinese GP turning into a one-stopper to increase tyre wear, and the new hard being an unknown quantity, still do not fully explain the entire missing kilogramme.
Pirelli’s past estimates of the entire mass that can be lost from a set of tyres hitting maximum wear rate is around one kilogramme – so the exact weight that was missing.
However, teams will be aware of this so any calculation should have taken this figure into account. They should only be caught out if the wear rate effectively spirals beyond this.
But it is understood that the wear rate on the hard on Sunday was less than it had been in the sprint on Saturday – where the mediums were pushed to the end of their life.
So teams will have known after the sprint exactly what the difference was between a new tyre and a fully worn one.
And while Gasly’s level of tyre wear could easily be greater than others, since he stopped on lap 10 of 56, Leclerc’s change to the hards came two laps after Max Verstappen and a lap after George Russell and Oscar Piastri.
Furthermore, and unlike at Spa last year for Russell, drivers had a chance to pick up marbles on the slowing down lap after the chequered flag in China. This tactic can easily account for more than one kilogramme of extra weight that the cars bring back to perc ferme before they are weighed.
So even if there had been some higher than anticipated wear from the tyres, the slow down lap should have allowed that to have been offset.
The question also has to be asked about why a host of other one-stopping cars – including all the podium finishers – did not suffer the same fate in ending up underweight.
The true answer about whether tyre wear was actually to blame for Leclerc being underweight will not become clear until later this week.
Leclerc’s tyres were handed back to Pirelli after the Chinese GP and have been sealed and flown back to its Milan headquarters for a detailed analysis. This work will deliver some conclusions about if there was anything unusual that took place.
The tightrope of disqualification
In the end, other factors are likely to have played their part too in what happened to Ferrari.
Leclerc’s plank will almost certainly have been worn down like Hamilton’s and cost him some car weight, and then there are ballast choices that Ferrari will have made when it comes to picking how close to the margins it wanted to be.
Ferrari team boss Fred Vasseur, who is pushing his team to be the very best it can, has been open in the past about the level of aggression that is needed to be successful.
Interestingly, speaking to The Race last year, Vasseur said that there was no way any team could be conservative these days in its choices – and that included car weight.
"We have to be at the limit on every single item of the car," he said. "We have to be aggressive. And it's a challenge to be at the limit of the weight, to be at the limit of the plank, to be at the limit of the cooling, to be at the limit of the fuel.
"It's a challenge because in the end you are taking more and more risk. And so why George was disqualified [in Spa] was because we are all like this [on the edge].
"I think that Mercedes, five years ago, carried five kilos of fuel to be safer. But today, nobody can do this kind of exercise. We are all on the edge of being disqualified every single weekend."
In China, Ferrari fell on the wrong side of that.
