The Red has never really been in struggle for success this season. And the British has yet to conquer the first podium
Zero wins. Ferrari is still stopped there: blocked in front of a number that does not lie and that describes, better than any other statistics, the disappointment of a season of vanified hopes. Also archived the race weekend in Baku, the seventeenth of this 2025, the number zero becomes thus increasingly heavy especially if opposed to that of the opponents in the top teams. The victories of McLaren are twelve, seven for the leader of the Oscar Plastri championship and five for Lando Norris, four of the Red Bull with a Max Verstappen who, after the second consecutive victory, is put back inside the challenge of a (very complicated) final struggle for the title, and one for Mercedes thanks to the success of George Russell in Canada. It still stops to zero therefore, among the greats of Formula 1, there is only the red. A Ferrari who in 2024 had triumphed in five great prizes, reaching the end of the championship with successful ambitions in the manufacturers’ title, and which this year had presented itself at the start of the season as a second ideal strength to aim for a World Cup that has been missing in Maranello since 2008.
Goals
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A zero that well describes the performance of the SF-125, a single-seater that in every type of track given this year presented evident critical issues: at this point in 2025 the Red has faced city and permanent tracks, dry weather and rain situations with very different gradations of temperatures, mixed conditions, traced with fast or slow curves, with a low aerodynamic or high load, and in each of these- Next seen here and there – he never managed to triumph or to put himself concretely for a success. A car without positive peaks and with a window of use that is always very narrow, whose guidelability made the first season in red by Lewis Hamilton a struggle to find balance and performance: “We have made progress and yet we have achieved bad results in the last races – admitted the British at the end of the weekend in Azerbaijan – but the improvements have been there and we must simply do better in the optimization and in the execution”. Being able to close at the best of a weekend of the race, of the seven still available before the end of the season, will be essential for Hamilton to climb at least once on the podium. A result that the seven times world champion has hit in each championship in which he has participated since 2007, the year of his debut in F.1, to date. Do not do it in Ferrari, where the prospects declared at the beginning of the year were of quite another caliber, it would mean putting another cumbersome zero alongside that of the victories not yet arrived. The stellar pair that from this 2025 boasts the Maranello team, the most expensive of the entire Formula 1 grid with a total of 70 million euros in engagement (40 per Hamilton and 30 for Leclerc, excluded the bonuses) to bring results to the track in the absence of a car that can make the two champions, boasts.
Look forward
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The Monegasque, who arrived at his seventh year in red, appeared during the last races increasingly disheartened on the possibility of winning a GP by the end of the season. The idea of entering, even if only for a weekend, in the struggle among the adults, has never appeared more distant than Leclerc, who will find himself in front of a decisive moment of his career next year. 2026, with the expected regulatory change in Formula 1, will mark the beginning of a new sports cycle and consequently also the alleged overtur of many hierarchies. If Ferrari were to find himself in a location of world struggle for Leclerc, the wait, of a boy with a generational talent confined to look at the others winning, will be repaid. “Because winning with the red is my obsession,” Monegasque said many times. But if it doesn’t be like this, he too will be called to think about his future. “I’m not worried about next year – he reassured Team Principal Fred Vasseur -. I am convinced that I have a team that can win but we have to improve in every aspect and maintain this approach”. The alternative for 2026, in Maranello, cannot even be taken into consideration.
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