Up Next
Two weeks ago, Ferrari wasn’t a threat in the constructors’ championship, but back-to-back victories in the United States and Mexico have transformed its season and put it in a position where it could take its first Formula 1 title since 2008.
Ferrari held second in the championship for the first half of the campaign before it fell to third after July’s Hungarian Grand Prix. But recent successes in Austin and Mexico City have allowed it to move ahead of Red Bull and to within 29 points of McLaren.
Speaking after the Mexican Grand Prix, Leclerc said the constructors’ championship is now "realistically possible and it relies on us doing well more than others doing something wrong”.
Before the dramatic points swing over the past two weekends, Ferrari wasn’t really in the hunt. Now, both Leclerc and Sainz not only sense there’s a chance, but admit to increasingly discussing the possibility.
Constructors' swing
Before Austin
1 McLaren 516
2 Red Bull -41
3 Ferrari -75
After Mexico
1 McLaren 566
2 Ferrari -29
3 Red Bull -54
“We both believe it is possible and we are actually talking about it more and more often now,” said Sainz when asked about Ferrari's title chances by The Race.
"We pump each other up a bit, knowing that there's a chance and we are like, ‘yeah, come on’.
“One of the keys is going to be consistency and having the two drivers always up there. We just need to keep ourselves in that fight and don't get obsessed with it because it's not like it depends only on us.
"We also, given how fast McLaren is, depend a bit on them. But we're going to keep doing the best we can and keep pumping each other up to win it.”
Ferrari’s upswing is not only down to its own improvements, but also to rivals struggling.
Red Bull still lacks the edge of pace despite mounting a partial recovery with the new floor introduced in Austin, while the last two tracks visited have exposed the lingering weaknesses in the McLaren package, namely braking into slower corners where the car is, as team principal Andrea Stella put it, “not the easiest to push at the limit".
While it’s only now Ferrari’s progress has become clear on track, the key to its resurgence has been development work going on behind the scenes.
The story of Ferrari’s season is one of a reasonable start when it was consistently second-best team – albeit well behind Red Bull – before mid-season struggles started after Leclerc’s win in Monaco. It has now recovered well from this dip.
On-paper, Ferrari’s slump began in Canada where it had a terrible weekend and failed to score, but it was the floor upgrade for the following race, June’s Spanish Grand Prix, that caused trouble. This triggered porpoising in high-speed corners, and led to a difficult run of six races up to and including the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort.
Ferrari reverted to its pre-Spain floor at Silverstone (after Leclerc compromised his weekend to run it on Friday as part of a back-to-back) before making a minor mitigating tweak to the upgrade in Hungary in the run-up to the August break.
This helped, and Leclerc even took pole position at low-downforce Spa, but the first of two key upgrades laying the foundations for its title tilt was introduced at Monza.
This was a new floor, which appeared to work extremely well. Ferrari was confident the gains would translate to more typical circuits, but as Monza was followed by Azerbaijan and Singapore, the United States Grand Prix weekend was always circled in the calendar as the key test of whether it had successfully fixed the porpoising problems.
That’s because it had time to understand the floor, which was augmented by a new front wing introduced in Singapore to access increased front aerodynamic load and tackle the slow-corner entry weakness, and then prove it on a more conventional track configuration at the Circuit of the Americas.
“The fight is very, very tight,” said Vasseur in Mexico when asked by The Race about Ferrari's development progress.
“It means that we are all a bit on the edge. For one or two tenths, you can move from a very good weekend to a poor one.
"Sometimes when you bring something that you need one or two weekends to be used to set it up the car. That's probably what happened with us.
“The last time that we brought something I think was Monza, the big one. But we were not sure, perhaps at the beginning we were thinking that perhaps it's track-related. And then we had two street circuits in a row with Baku and Singapore, and it's only in Austin that we came back to a more conventional circuit, to the whole conclusion.
"But it's true that from Monza, we are in a much better place.”
Vasseur glossed over the other vital step in the development story, which was the more secretive upgrade to the front wing for Austin.
While teams must declare any significant upgrades to geometry of the bodywork, there’s no obligation to announce under-the-skin changes.
That includes structural ones, meaning the front wing flexibility changes Ferrari promised would come in the wake of the FIA clarifying how much movement was allowed – Vasseur said in Singapore that “as soon as we have a clarification from the FIA, we will act” on this topic - arrived for the US Grand Prix.
Wing flexibility is always a controversial subject.
The regulations demand bodywork is rigid, but in reality there has to be some flexing or parts would simply break. Working within the allowable tolerance, while passing all the mandatory FIA load tests, is all part of the game so Ferrari was correct to follow this path.
As a result, the car is easier to set up for a wide range of corner speeds. The front wing flexibility helps as it permits high wing angle for the slower corners to give more front-end grip. But as the wing flexes with load at high-speed, the downforce at the front ‘backs off’ and doesn’t increase to the point where it would create too much grip and a handling imbalance in the form of rear-end instability.
The Ferrari already performs well in slower corners, as well as in terms of riding bumps and kerbs.
Its main weakness remains high-speed turns, which was showcased in Austin and Mexico - and that could be exposed in next month’s Qatar Grand Prix.
“When you look into the detail of the Austin track, as long as we survive the first sector - which in qualifying we were two tenths off the Red Bull and McLaren in only three or four corners - then all of the other corners were perfect for Ferrari and we managed to make the time back in all the low-speed stuff,” said Sainz.
“We’re still lacking in high-speed corners, especially in qualifying mode, which makes me feel like Qatar will be a difficult race for us, but all the other circuits, hopefully we will be in the mix.
“Then, whether you win or not depends on how your race pace is that weekend, how you start, how you qualify, but at least being in the mix means you give yourself a chance of winning at maybe every track except for Qatar – that is not a Ferrari track at all.
"At the same time, qualifying remains a bit of our Achilles’ heel this year.”
Mexico suggested otherwise, but Sainz is right that Ferrari’s other weakness is single-lap pace. In 2022 and ‘23, this was its strength, but came at the expense of race pace as the car overworked the tyres.
This is a useful tool for getting the Pirellis in the right temperature window in qualifying, but can correlate with accelerated degradation in the race. The trend has been reversed this year.
While the qualifying-to-race performance offset was something Ferrari successfully worked to fix, it’s gone too far the other way. The hope is the qualifying versus race pace trade-off will be more even next year, but in the short term Ferrari has been chipping away at this to ease the problem.
Add to that the strong driver line-up and a race team trackside that has become more dependable operationally, notably when it comes to strategy, and that makes Ferrari a serious threat.
Mexico also showcased the strength of its driver line-up, as both McLaren’s Oscar Piastri and Red Bull’s Sergio Perez were eliminated in Q1.
It was unexpected for Piastri, but Perez’s lack of performance since his strong start to the season has proved catastrophic for Red Bull’s constructors’ championship hopes.
Ferrari even showcased its driver depth when Ollie Bearman subbed for Sainz in Saudi Arabia, banking valuable points for seventh place on his grand prix debut despite not running in Friday practice.
With just four grands prix left - plus two sprint races - Ferrari is hopeful of being a strong victory contender at three of the remaining tracks, the aforementioned exception being Qatar.
As Stella pointed out in Mexico, that is expected to be McLaren territory. But while the papaya team is still the favourite for the constructors’ championship, Ferrari poses a far more serious threat than Red Bull.
“Ferrari have done a really good job, because they have constantly developed their car, they have gone through some times in which the development didn't behave like they expected, but they have worked their way through,” said Stella - himself a former Ferrari man.
“They fixed some of the issues and now they have a very competitive car. So well done to them.
“What we are seeing at the same time is a bit of a track dependency. If you take the mid-sector here [Mexico] and the fast corners, we can see in the GPS overlays that we have definitely the fastest car.
"But in the tracks that we have visited recently, there's not many of these sections. So some of this swing in McLaren's competitiveness does have to do with the track characteristics.
"We hope that the upgrades that we have taken partly in Austin, partly here and there will be a little bit in Brazil as well, will help us ultimately make a little step forward.
“For the remainder of the season, there's still some circuits that should suit McLaren. I would expect the last couple of races to be good to us, but I would say that a circuit like Vegas would still be a Ferrari circuit, and maybe Brazil is a bit of a draw.”
As for Vasseur, as always he’s working to keep the team focused on its own processes and execution while the headlines are grabbed by the battle between McLaren and Red Bull and the hint of a drivers’ championship fight.
“As long as you are all focused on Max and Norris, this is perfect for us,” said Vasseur.
“You can be focused on the fight between Toto and Christian, between Zak and Christian, between Lando and Max.
"As long as we are under the radar, it allows us to be fully focused on what we are doing, on the team, on the drivers.
"This is a perfect situation for us.”
