Beaten by Williams on 'pure pace' - Ferrari's F1 season hits new low

Defeated by Williams on pure pace, unable to unlock more speed whatever the drivers try, and what used to be a major strength now appears to be the car's main weakness - Miami Grand Prix qualifying was undoubtedly a new low in what has so far been a fairly low-key 2025 Formula 1 season for Ferrari.

Charles Leclerc qualifying eighth fastest and Lewis Hamilton only 12th represents Ferrari's worst combined qualifying result of 2025 so far, and the worst individual qualifying result of the year for each driver too.

For Leclerc, this continues a recent running theme for him of feeling he's extracting every last ounce of potential from a car that just fundamentally lacks pace compared to the frontrunning McLarens, Max Verstappen's Red Bull and the Mercedes.

For Hamilton, the situation is slightly more nuanced. His recent qualifying deficits to Leclerc in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia were frankly alarming, but in Miami there was barely half a tenth of a second between them when Hamilton fell in Q2 - a session in which he also didn't run a new set of soft Pirellis.

So, his worst result of 2025 in qualifying actually masks one of Hamilton's better performances relative to his team-mate.

But that oddity matters far less than the bigger picture - and here both drivers were broadly aligned in calling out the fundamental failings in a car that is far from delivering against lofty pre-season expectations.

Hamilton called qualifying a "difficult session" where "on pure pace, we've been outqualified by a Williams (sic) - who are doing a great job, James [Vowles] and his team are doing an amazing job, but on pure pace that's where we are."

This could of course be track specific, rather than the beginning of a slide into the midfield, but even though both drivers made mistakes - under-braking for Turn 17 especially - it has to be said on a circuit like Miami, with a decent number of low-speed corners, you'd expect Ferrari to go well - and certainly be ahead of Williams.

"It is frustrating, but to be honest this weekend I feel we are maximising the potential of the car," said Leclerc, who in Q3 was almost two tenths slower than former team-mate Carlos Sainz's Williams.

"It shows the potential of the car is just not there, and when I finish a lap, again today in qualifying, I feel very satisfied with my lap, but it's only bringing us whatever it is - P8 or something.

"So, we've got to look at it. I think a track like this also highlights our weaknesses - there's a lot of low-speed content, both Williams are in front of us, and I consider my lap a good one, so I think it's pretty easy to understand where we are lacking."

While conceding his unfortunate pre-sprint race crash in the wet on Saturday morning "made the whole day a lot more difficult" than it otherwise might have been for Ferrari, Leclerc refused to use that as an excuse for underperformance.

He felt the repaired car was working fine, though again - as has been the case basically since Japan - Leclerc said he had to "change massively the car, the tools and everything, in order to have kind of a balance I liked", which suggests whatever underwhelming lap time he is able to extract from the Ferrari is not coming easily.

Efforts to upgrade the car have also so far missed the mark, with Leclerc especially irate with the new floor introduced for Bahrain not really lifting the performance ceiling of the car in the way Leclerc expected it to do last time out in Jeddah.

Leclerc refutes any suggestion the Ferrari is still somehow rideheight compromised, in the way it was through the first two races of the season, and which led to that ugly grand prix disqualification for Hamilton in China after winning the sprint.

While it's true Ferrari was closer to the pace again in sprint qualifying here compared to grand prix qualifying, Leclerc calls that a "coincidence" because he insists (without directly mentioning it) that Ferrari did not need to raise the car's ground clearance between the sprint race and GP qualifying.

Miami anyway seems to be a track where a decent rideheight is not quite so difficult to achieve as it is in some places.

"We are just not fast," Leclerc said, when questioned on this apparent sprint/GP discrepancy by The Race's Jon Noble. "And whatever we do with the car - we can run it in different ways, but we just don't have the downforce the others have at the moment, especially at low speed."

This lack of low-speed performance has to be of major concern to Ferrari, which has built much of its success in this rules era on being extremely strong at circuits with a bias towards slow-speed corners.

Could it be that in attempting to make the sort of all-rounder needed to challenge properly for a world championship Ferrari is now going through the sort of pain Williams itself experienced in 2024, when it basically improved its weaknesses at the expense of its strengths?

Hamilton wouldn't know, because this is only his sixth grand prix with the team, but he's certainly feeling the pain of not being able to coax a tune from what is turning out to be a very unresponsive instrument.

"In the sprint we had a decent result, but it wasn't off pure pace it was on strategy," he said, complaining again that the Ferrari's unfamiliar Brembo brakes are "very difficult" for him to use.

"I was one of the first in this morning to make sure that we took the right steps through the day, and it didn't make any difference.

"This car's just different every time you go out. It's different every session, every time you go out there.

"I've been trying everything. The smallest bit of time today and I was out. If we'd gone out on the new tyre [in Q2], I probably would have been in Q3 and then it would just be that I'd be eighth or ninth with Charles.

"It doesn't make a huge difference. The fact is we are trying and we don't have the pace at the moment.

"We need some upgrades, we need some improvements. We've got lots of things that need to be better."