Ferrari confirm change of plan with SF-25 upgrade delayed

Ferrari will not continue their upgrade program at the Miami Grand Prix with team principal Fred Vasseur revealing they will “probably” wait until Imola.

It’s a blow for Lewis Hamilton, who again failed to reach the podium with a distant P7 result at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.

Ferrari: We keep the same approach as last year…

Despite speculation in pre-season, notably amongst the Italian media, that Ferrari had found half a second with the all-new SF-25, the Scuderia have at best been the third fastest team on the track this season, by largely they’ve been fourth in the pecking order.

Behind McLaren, Mercedes and Red Bull, Charles Leclerc broke the team’s podium duck at the Jeddah circuit as he raced from fourth to third while his team-mate Hamilton wasn’t able to improve on his P7 on the grid.

Hamilton’s result meant he hasn’t finished higher than P5 in a grand prix since joining Ferrari and he has no idea what he can do to turn that around.

“I don’t have an answer for you, no,” he told the media including PlanetF1.com in Saudi Arabia. “There’s nothing. Balance, struggling to feel the car beneath me, but there’s no particular thing.

Hamilton also won’t get any help from Ferrari through an upgrade to the SF-25 for the Miami Grand Prix, Vasseur revealing they’re going to delay that until the next race at Imola.

“Miami, there is the Sprint race and little time to work; we will probably bring updates to Imola,” the Ferrari team principal said.

He added: “When you understand where the problems are, you can work to solve them and we think we have understood where to intervene.

“We keep the same approach as last year and think race by race.”

operating window, something that’s seemingly stymied the Scuderia in the opening few rounds.

Vasseur’s hesitancy ahead of a Sprint weekend comes as no surprise given the Frenchman was reportedly cautious about bringing the new floor to Bahrain.

According to Gazzetta dello Sport, Ferrari were ‘divided’ over it, with Vasseur and technical director Loic Serra said to think that it would be ‘better to perfect the dynamic balance of the car before introducing a variant to the current aerodynamics.

‘They imply, in support of this thesis, that otherwise the benefits deriving from the development itself could be cancelled, or at best it would be difficult to understand its real effectiveness.’

But while Leclerc was happy that the floor was a step in the right direction as he secured his first podium of the campaign in Saudi Arabia, the Monegasque driver concedes more needs to be done to improve the car.

“We need to keep pushing the maximum and, hopefully, upgrades are coming soon in order to improve the car,” said the eight-time grand prix winner.

“There are answers in what we are doing, and we are doing something wrong, clearly. We’ve got to find it.