Formula 1 tradition team Ferrari is planning only “small parts, but no longer large update packages” by the end of the 2025 season. Team boss Frederic Vasseur explained this after the Belgium Grand Prix in Spa-Francorchamps. Ferrari had introduced his last major technical update there prematurely.
According to Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc, the new parts brought “what we had expected from it – and that is very positive,” says Leclerc, who ended the Grand Prix in third place.
However, Ferrari has not yet fully exhausted the spa update: under the sprint format with only free training, there was too little time. “But it was a good first weekend,” says Leclerc. “We now have to learn how to get the best out of this update.”
Ferrari team boss Vasseur: The update still needs fine adjustment
Team boss Vasseur speaks here of a necessary “fine adjustment”, for which Ferrari in Spa had already created good foundations: “We just didn’t want to wait until Budapest, even if you only get difficulty under the sprint format. But I think it was the right decision – also with a view to preparing for Hungary.”
There, Ferrari wants to “bring everything a little earlier the weekend with the lessons from Belgium to be a little more powerful,” explains Vasseur. “You have to be the behavior of the car [mit den neuen Teilen] Understand exactly, the correlation to the brakes, the chassis height and the like. We are currently in this process. “
The sprint format in Spa-Francorchamps made Ferrari made working with the update. “If I could have chosen it, I would have preferred to have had a normal weekend in Spa,” says Vasseur. “Then we could have introduced the update slower and gradually. But I’m not doing the calendar planning.”
Does the update also strike in Hungary?
“The bottom line was that it was better to bring the update to Spa, even if there was a certain risk due to the changeable weather. But we are very well prepared for Budapest.”
But the Hungaroring with its many slow to medium-fast curves differs drastically from the high-speed character of the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps. So what is Ferrari out of Hungary if the SF-25 in the few slow curves in Spa, according to Vasseur, was “not exactly outstanding”?
The team boss does not want to overestimate this impression: “I am confident that all the tests we have done in Spa will pay off next weekend. There is still room for improvement,” said Vasseur.
Leclerc is even more optimistic: He hopes that Ferrari can “soon put a little more pressure on McLaren” with the technical updates. This did not succeed in Belgium last weekend: Leclerc as the best McLaren persecutor was already missing in qualifying over three tenths of a second. In the Grand Prix, his gap was more than 16 seconds.