Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur confirmed his squad is bringing an upgrade package over the coming races, but felt there is much more performance in cleaner race weekends, starting with getting on top of Pirelli’s tyres.
After Charles Leclerc’s first 2025 podium in Spain, the Canadian Grand Prix weekend was another sobering one for Ferrari which started going wrong with the Monegasque’s FP1 crash, then his crucial mistake in dirty air in Q3 and was topped by Lewis Hamilton hitting a groundhog in the race that left him with a loss of downforce. Questions were also asked about its strategy on both cars.
When Hamilton was asked what was needed for Ferrari to be a more consistent challenger after qualifying fifth in Montreal, he replied: “Ultimately, we need upgrades. We need an upgrade to be able to fight the guys up front.
“We’ve not had any upgrades or anything like that. It’s the same car for quite some time now. The fact is, with this car, hopefully we can still fight for second in the constructors’ [championship].”
For all of the criticism Ferrari has received, it is still the most consistent points scorer behind runaway leader McLaren and only 16 points behind second placed Mercedes – and 21 ahead of Red Bull. Although Hamilton is also having his well-documented struggles, key to its challenge is that Ferrari still has a higher scoring second car than both rival squads as Andrea Kimi Antonelli gets acclimated at Mercedes and Yuki Tsunoda still wrestles with the Red Bull.
Other than receiving what was only a modest car tweak in Imola, the seven-time world champion will get his wish pretty soon as Ferrari is readying a batch of parts to be introduced by Silverstone, with another potential upgrade coming after the mid-July round.
But beleaguered team boss Fred Vasseur, who had to bat away Italian media reports about his future at the weekend, isn’t envisaging that those improvements will somehow turn the Scuderia’s fortunes around and allow it to start winning again, which it hasn’t managed since Carlos Sainz’s magical Mexico weekend last year. Instead, he insists there is much more performance to find by executing its race weekends better, which it failed to do in Canada as Leclerc and Hamilton finish fifth and sixth.
Watch: Could Lando’s mistake cost McLaren? – F1 Canadian GP Review
“We will have an upgrade soon, before the UK [round]. And perhaps another one a bit later. But honestly today, I think there is much more in the execution and what you are getting from the car than the potential of the car itself,” he cautioned.
“Now we are at the end of these regulations, and we all know that when we are bringing something to the track, we are more speaking about hundredths rather than tenths. And if you don’t do a good usage of the car, because the set-up is a bit different, you can lose tenths. A couple of times when we brought upgrades in the past, we needed also one or two races to adapt the set-up to the new version.
“Honestly, I want to put the focus much more on the execution than the pure potential of the car. But we will bring something.
“If we want to start from the first rows and to have a clean weekend as in Monaco, we need to do a very smooth weekend in terms of execution. And it’s where we failed massively in Canada. As soon as you have something going wrong, you are paying the price.”
Getting the best out of Pirelli’s rubber – in the race but especially in qualifying – with this generation of cars has been a challenge across the grid, and Ferrari has been trying different things to find an edge on that front. In Spanish GP qualifying Leclerc sacrificed a set of softs early on for the sake of saving an additional set of medium tyres for the race, leaving him just seventh on the grid after a single Q3 run.
As far back as the season opener in Melbourne, though, both Ferrari drivers have often been struggling in qualifying to get Pirelli’s tyres in the right working window on their out-laps. Imola was the worst example, with Leclerc and Hamilton qualifying 11th and 12th respectively after failing to improve on their final flyer with the new C6 soft tyres.
At the time, that prompted Leclerc to suggest Ferrari has a problem getting the peak performance out of brand-new tyres, which are theoretically faster but less consistent than scrubbed rubber, although he felt the team’s biggest bottleneck was outright performance.
Charles Leclerc, Ferrari, Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari
Photo by: Clive Rose / Getty Images
But Vasseur still believes that optimising the tyres is the key to challenging further up front: “I think the pace was decent in Barcelona, we were able to be quick in sector one there, we were quick in Monaco. Honestly, I’m not sure that the characteristics of the car are the main issue today. The main issue is to do a good usage of the tyres first and to understand the tyres and to choose the good ones for qualifying.
“The exercise is quite difficult. I think Max [Verstappen] and Mercedes did a better job on the [Canada] weekend than McLaren and us, but also in the choice of the tyres, probably from the beginning of the weekend.
“In tyre usage and tyre performance, I think there is much more [difference] than between the cars. It doesn’t matter the car, if the team is doing a very good job on the tyres, they will be in front. It will be like this until the end of the season. It’s the same for everybody. We have to do a better job.”
2026 focus not derailing 2025
Vasseur previously said Ferrari was keen to keep developing its 2025 car despite the spectre of the 2026 regulations looming large, if only to keep the squad as motivated as possible this year. And because he feels there are bigger gains to be made trackside than in the wind tunnel, he refuted suggestions that the resource split between the two rulesets is tripping his team up.
“We have to make some choices on what is the allocation for 2025 [and what is] the allocation for 2026. This is true for us, but it’s true for everybody,” the Frenchman added. “But honestly, it’s absolutely not the issue for us.
“Today, the issue is not the potential of the car, it’s not the potential of Lewis or Charles. It’s the execution, the global execution. And this is absolutely not linked to the split between 2026 and 2025.”
Additional reporting by Mark Mann-Bryans
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