Ferrari are hoping that a ‘bold’ rear suspension upgrade planned for next month will come to the rescue of Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc.

Ferrari entered the F1 2025 season confident of ending their extended wait for a World Championship. having finished just 14 points short of Constructors’ title winners McLaren last year.

‘Bold’ Ferrari upgrade to save Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc’s season?

However, the Scuderia already trail the runaway leaders by 152 points after claiming just a single podium finish across the first six races of the new season.

Hamilton, the team’s marquee signing from Mercedes over the winter, has finished no higher than fifth in a grand prix for Ferrari so far having struggled to adapt to his new machinery.

Ferrari introduced their first major upgrade of F1 2025 at last month’s Bahrain Grand Prix, where Hamilton and Leclerc ran a revised floor.

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The team had been expected to bring another sizeable package at this weekend’s Emilia Romagna Grand Prix at Imola, the first European round of the season.

However, team principal Fred Vasseur recently admitted that Ferrari will make only “a small step” at Imola with another planned for the Spanish Grand Prix in early June.

The Spanish GP will see all teams introduce revised front wings in order to comply with the FIA’s increased clampdown on so-called flexi wings, which has been tipped by some to shake up the pecking order.

And it has emerged that Ferrari are pinning their hopes on a tweak to the rear suspension to set themselves up for a more productive second half of F1 2025.

A report by the Italian edition of Motorsport.com has claimed that Ferrari will introduce a new rear suspension late next month – likely around the time of the Austrian Grand Prix on June 29 – in a bid to save their season.

It is said that the tweak will allow Ferrari to achieve ‘a more extreme mechanical setup’, allowing the team to run the SF-25 closer to the ground having been forced to raise the ride height since Hamilton was disqualified for excessive skid-block wear in China.

The layout of the suspension is not expected to change with Ferrari poised to stick with their current pullrod design at the rear, with budgetary restraints during F1’s cost-cap era preventing significant mid-season alterations.

Ferrari’s suspension choices have been heavily scrutisined throughout the ground-effect era, with the Prancing Horse and customers Haas the only teams left competing with a pullrod rear suspension layout.

The remaining eight outfits all elect for a pushrod solution.

Ferrari are not expecting the upgrade to bring the car into title contention in the second half of the season, but to help raise the team’s morale ahead of F1 2026 with the Scuderia currently ‘very busy’ designing Project 678, the first Ferrari of Formula 1’s new regulatory era.

Ferrari are expected to use the three races prior to the summer break – the British, Belgian and Hungarian grands prix – to assess the extent of the changes to the rear suspension combined with an accompanying aerodynamic package.

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The news of Ferrari’s upgrade plans comes after Jolyon Palmer, the F1 pundit, described the Scuderia as the biggest disappointment of F1 2025 so far.

He told the official F1 website: “In my view, Ferrari has been the most disappointing team so far, having finished 2024 so strongly.

“With the signing of Hamilton, this should have been a glory year for them, and we saw a glimpse of that early on in China, when Lewis was happier with the car and took the sprint win, and the team were competitive.

“Hamilton is a driver who has struggled with snappy rear instability for the last couple of seasons.

“It was this inconsistency that he was struggling with in the Mercedes last year and that trend seems to have followed him to Ferrari so far too.

“He generally likes to attack the corners with high entry speed, but needs a stable rear end to do that effectively and we saw him trying to rework his driving style in Melbourne to get more out of this car.

“Clearly that process is still ongoing, as is trying to find the right rhythm with his race engineer Riccardo Adami – and these are all teething problems that I doubt both team and driver were expecting to still be issues this far into the season.”

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