It’s always killing season at Ferrari.
Formula 1’s most successful team is also its most violent. No team has won as much the Scuderia, but no team is as well practised at self-immolation as the men and women of Maranello.
We’re reminded of this fact as Ferrari stares down the barrel of its 17th winless season in 76 years of competition and its fourth of the last decade.
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Combined with the season’s sky-high expectations following last year’s narrow constructors title defeat, the atmosphere at the Scuderia is apparently tense.
Now Ferrari chairman John Elkann has lit the fuse.
Speaking to the Italian media last week, the heir of the Italian dynastic Agnelli family appeared to make clear where he felt the faults at Ferrari lay.
“Brazil was a huge disappointment,” he said, reflecting on the team’s third non-scoring grand prix of the season.
“If we look at the Formula 1 championship, we can say that our mechanics are winning the championship with their performance and everything they’ve done on the pit stops.
“If we look at our engineers, there’s no doubt that the car has improved.
“If we look at the rest, it’s not up to par.
“We certainly have drivers for whom it’s important to focus on driving and talk less, because we still have important races ahead of us, and it’s not impossible to get second place [in the constructors championship].”
It came off as a brutal smackdown of Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton.
Leclerc, for so long the centre of Ferrari’s Formula 1 program, has sounded increasingly despondent this season about his prospects of ever winning with the Italian team as it rolls down the title table. He’s returned just seven podiums this season, only two of which were second place.
Hamilton described his first season at Ferrari as a “nightmare” after retiring from the Sao Paulo Grand Prix with a damaged car. Though he’s undoubtedly failed to meet performance expectations this season, the Briton’s victory in the Shanghai sprint remains the team’s only win of any description this year.
In a final devastating flourish, Elkann compared Ferrari’s fortunes in Formula 1 to its recently revived endurance racing program.
“To win both as a constructor and as drivers [in the World Endurance Championship] is a beautiful demonstration that when Ferrari is united, when everyone is together, you can achieve great things,” he said.
“When Ferrari is united, results are achieved.”
Ferrari has reportedly defended Elkann’s commentary as being “constructive” and an effort to motivate the team.
If he was looking for a reaction, he got one, though perhaps not in the way he expected.
Leclerc posted on social media that “only unity can help us turn that situation around in the last three races,” appearing to deliberately use similar language to his boss.
Hamilton’s message seemed ever more pointed.
“I back my team. I back myself. I will not give up. Not now, not then, not ever,” he wrote.
Fostering unity is the defining challenge at Ferrari, the most under-pressure team in Formula 1, but Elkann’s intervention will intensify the spotlight on his struggling team over the final three races.
Whether it was worthwhile depends on whether you see any truth to his arguments.
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STICK TO DRIVING
Racing for Ferrari isn’t like racing for other teams. No individual is bigger than any F1 team, but in Maranello the team is definitely bigger than the driver.
It’s been an unwritten rule for practically as long as Ferrari has competed: the team and its car aren’t up for criticism.
Consider in 1991 that Alain Prost was sacked with a race to run after likening his Ferrari’s handling characteristics to that of a truck.
That comment was only part of the reason he was dismissed, with politics behind the scenes sealing the deal, but the fact it was good cover illustrates that drivers at Ferrari are expected to conduct themselves in a certain way.
More recently consider the example of Sebastian Vettel, whose six-year stint at Ferrari started as a dream but ended in a nightmare.
If you’re looking for a pivotal moment in the Vettel-Ferrari relationship, consider the 2016 season.
Despite starting the campaign with multiple podiums — albeit a long way behind the all-conquering Mercedes team — Ferrari lost its form through the season, which ended as its second winless campaign in almost a quarter of century.
Vettel had arrived at Ferrari as a four-time champion and heralded as the driver to win the team’s first title of any description since 2008. He arrived from Red Bull Racing, which had dominated the first four years of the decade and was the only one to beat Mercedes in 2016.
Unsurprisingly he attempted to mould Ferrari into what he knew was title-winning shape.
It didn’t go down well with management.
“Everybody has to earn their position and salary,” then principal Maurizio Arrivabene said pointedly at the time. “Sebastian just needs to focus on the car.”
‘Stick to driving’ seemed to be the message. ‘We know what we’re doing.’
Vettel was an outside title contender in 2017 and 2018, but the arrival of Leclerc in 2019 signalled the end of the German’s Ferrari career, and he left at the end of 2020.
Ferrari’s title drought has continued.
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IS HAMILTON DOOMED TO VETTEL’S FATE?
Vettel’s story offers a fascinating parallel at the end of a year in which Hamilton’s struggles have been a major talking point.
Part of his underperformance has been his transition to working in the Ferrari way.
Hamilton has rarely publicly criticised the team, instead shouldering his blame — fairly enough — for often not being at Leclerc’s level.
But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been taking notes on the team’s shortcomings.
After the mid-season break Hamilton revealed that he’d been preparing and sending the team documents about changes he felt needed to be made to get Maranello into title-winning shape and to help him get the best from himself.
His notes went to structural issues as well as problems with the car.
This is entirely unsurprising.
Ferrari didn’t shell out for Hamilton just for fun. He brings with him a decade of experience racing for Mercedes, where he broke the records set by Ferrari and Michael Schumacher for domination over time.
Incorporating that experience is what can turn Ferrari, a perennial underachiever given its mighty resources and infrastructure, back into a winner.
It’s the same reason any team poaches anyone from the pointy end of the grid.
But according to ESPN, Hamilton’s feedback has received a cool reaction. While some have welcomed his perspective, others have apparently resented his input.
It sounds alarmingly familiar.
Perhaps more interesting has been that Leclerc appears to have been caught up in the executive-level smackdown.
Leclerc is a Ferrari academy product long dubbed in Italy as il predestinato — the predestined one. It took him only one year at the Scuderia to displace Vettel as the team’s lead driver, and Ferrari has been built around him ever since.
His rarely wavered from winning with Ferrari being his lifelong dream and sole objective.
But this year he’s been more willing to criticise publicly. His disappointment has been more obvious. He hasn’t felt obliged to dress up the team’s shortcomings.
It’s understandable after the team ended 2024 with the quickest car and came within 14 points of the constructors title. Expectations were that it would be a leader this year. Instead it’s a distant fourth in the standings and still searching for a first win of the year.
Leclerc has since sounded a warning about the team’s preparedness for 2026, noting that if Ferrari can’t hit the ground running under next year’s new rules, it’ll likely take several more years to reach competitiveness.
Leclerc holds a long-term contract, though it would certainly have performance-related exit clauses, and this year’s he’s been forced to deflect persistent rumours that his management is scoping the field.
At 28 years old and entering what’s conventionally considered the prime of a driver’s career, he’d be silly not to at least consider the difficult question of leaving the team.
Loyalty is a two-way street, but perhaps Ferrari sees commentary even from its golden son as too inconvenient a truth.
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BUT HAS THE CAR BEEN ANY GOOD?
Of course Ferrari’s hard line on criticism wouldn’t be an issue if the car was competitive in the first place, as Elkann appeared to suggest.
But it’s hard to tally his assessment with reality.
The chairman noted the team’s improved pit stop performance straight off the bat, and certainly it’s true that its consistency in the lane has improved.
Ferrari has completed the fastest pit stop at nine races so far this year, more than any other team, albeit the fastest overall stop belongs to McLaren.
While positive, it’s of limited value when the team doesn’t have the car speed to convert those quick stops into big results.
Elkann argued that there’s “no doubt” the car has improved, but the data doesn’t back that up.
Comparing every team’s fastest lap of the weekend to the overall fastest shows Ferrari is comfortably the slowest car among the frontrunners.
Gap to fastest, frontrunners
1. McLaren: +0.054 seconds
2. Red Bull Racing: +0.264 seconds
3. Mercedes: +0.367 seconds
4. Ferrari: +0.442 seconds
It’s yet to end a weekend with the fastest single lap — including in Hungary, where Leclerc’s pole effort came as track conditions slowed in Q3; he’d been comfortably beaten by McLaren in the faster Q2 session.
Approximating development, to go directly to Elkann’s point, demonstrates the bare minimum improvement at best.
We can calculate the development rate by drawing a trend line through each team’s gap to the fastest single lap over the course of the season.
Development rate, frontrunners
1. Ferrari: improved by 0.001 seconds
2. Red Bull Racing: degraded by 0.031 seconds
3. Mercedes: degraded by 0.067 seconds
4. McLaren: degraded by 0.109 seconds
All this shows, though, is that Ferrari has effectively stood still in the battle for pole. Red Bull Racing, Mercedes and McLaren’s number have fluctuated as they’ve found themselves in a three-way battle for pole.
Ferrari’s best weekends have seen to it compete for podiums but never wins. Its worst have seen it beaten by teams that belong in the midfield.
To strike out at the drivers as being the chief problem for being insufficiently focused on driving their slow car is a tremendous example of misdirection.
Elkann’s final point, though, might be most interesting.
He rightly praises the brand’s World Endurance Championship success, with Ferrari’s entry winning both the drivers and the constructors titles just three years since returning to the top class.
Of course while Ferrari designed its WEC-winning car, its factory entry is operated by AF Corse, fundamentally different to its entirely in-house F1 team.
WEC also uses balance of performance to ensure the different cars in the hypercar class are evenly matched. You can think of BOP like a handicap, adjusting weight and power output to ensure all the cars are roughly equal.
Teams are contractually obliged not to criticise the BOP system, even as it’s adjusted from round to round, but The Race has reported that wild performance swings have caused tensions to simmer over the last two years. The sport is mulling over changing the rules for next season.
Elkann arguing that the difference between his F1 and sports car operations is simply teamwork, then, is shallow at best and deliberately misleading at worst.
WEC has regulatory interest in levelling the playing field between the top teams. Formula 1 is as open as it gets. Ferrari has done well in one but poorly in the other. You can connect the dots for yourself at home.
Perhaps disunity inside the Formula 1 team is an issue, but coming in over the top and singling out the drivers will do nothing to improve the situation.
All Elkann has done is turn Ferrari into a talking point for all the wrong reasons, repeating the decades-old mistake of executives suffocating the team with useless, suffocating pressure that inevitably leads to collapse.
The question is whether there’s time to change course before the killing season commences.