what's going on at Ferrari f1 team? (a detailed explanation)

Ferrari's 2025 Formula One season, by far has been quite the rollercoaster. To recap, Sir Lewis Hamilton, the seven-time Formula One champion, signed a contract with Ferrari at the beginning of the 2024 season, leaving Mercedes AMG Petronas, the team he spent his twelve seasons with, and won 6  championships with. After this shocking move, the 4-time Grand Prix winner, Carlos Sainz, was replaced by Hamilton. Before the 2025 F1 season could even begin, there was a lot of anticipation around the driver pairing of Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc, an 8-time Grand Prix winner, who has also been the junior project of Ferrari. Everyone expected the team to go through a radical transformation with such a strong driver line-up and bring Ferrari back to its glory; the 'tifosi' (Ferrari fans) were thrilled to have such an addition to the team.  

But things started to go downhill from the very first Grand Prix of the year. The first race of the '25 season was Australia, where both the Ferraris finished 8th (Charles Leclerc) and 10th (Lewis Hamilton) because the Ferrari SF-25 failed to deliver on track with a combination of a poor strategy call on tyres and race pace, with a few driver errors. After the disappointing start of the season, the Italian team moved towards round 2, the Chinese Grand Prix, which was a sprint weekend, but even after the painful Australian Grand Prix, spirits were raised when Hamilton was on Pole position for the Sprint race, which resulted in him winning the race scoring 8 points for the team. This boosted the morale and woke the Tifosi and the team from their slumber. However, just when things started to take a positive turn, both the Ferraris were disqualified from the main race because of technical violations, such as Leclerc's car being 1kg underweight and Hamilton's car being below the minimum thickness allowed by the regulations which basically means the car to be marginally too low to the ground. 

Nevertheless, the team continued to move forward into the next round of the season: Japan. The race resulted in Leclerc finishing in fourth and Hamilton finishing seventh, yet another discouraging race for him. The next race: Bahrain, the team progressed into a fourth finish for Leclerc and a 5th finish for Hamilton. Round 5 was Saudi Arabia, where Leclerc managed to get a podium finish, but at the same time, it was another underwhelming race for Hamilton; the driver finished seventh in the Grand Prix due to adjusting his driving style to the car. 

On to Miami, the second sprint weekend of the season. Hamilton was uplifted after finishing 3rd in the sprint race, but after a frustrating qualifying, he ultimately ended up being knocked out in Q2, leading him to start the Grand Prix from 12th on the grid. In the main race, Hamilton managed to make four places and end the race within the points by being 8th, and his teammate finished in 7th. Whilst the race there was quite a misunderstanding and a lack of communication among the team because of the team radio, leading to the drivers being frustrated and vexed. In one of the tense team radio exchanges, ''You want me to just sit here and watch the race?'' said Hamilton on lap 36, to which Adami replied ''We'll come back to you'', which is not the ideal response you want to hear from your race engineer when you're going at the speed of 200-300 km/h. 

In the recent Grand Prix: Emilia-Romagna, the home of the Italian team, the team once again faced another crushing qualifying, leading both their drivers to be knocked out in Q2 once again. But due to the race pace, Hamilton was able to finish fourth, leaving him finally with a sense of achievement and progress. On the other hand, Leclerc finished the race in 6th position after giving his position back to Alex Albon (Williams racing team driver) to avoid getting a 5-second penalty. The result left Charles Leclerc unhappy, ''I knew from the moment I didn't take a pit stop on the second safety car that it was going to be a very difficult race'', says Leclerc in a post-race interview.

In conclusion, Ferrari's biggest weakness is the SF-25, which has failed to deliver on many occasions, the drivers have frequently complained about the brakes or how the car understeers/oversteers and sometimes the strategy calls can also become the reason costing them the race or possibly the championship if they don't work on it. And as far as the progress of Lewis Hamilton is concerned, the driver is just getting used to adapting the car to his driving style, which can take time because it's all brand new to him, as he spent almost all of his career at the Mercedes team. Now, if we talk about Ferrari's biggest asset, it has to be the strong driver lineup; both drivers have the potential and capability to win more races if they are provided with better radio communication and coordination from the team to make the championship table look healthier. The next race is in Monaco, which is the home race of the Monegasque Scuderia driver, Charles Leclerc. This certain race will be the one to watch because in the previous season, Leclerc had won the Monaco Grand Prix, let's see what he and Ferrari can do this time.