🇧🇷 F1'25 R21: No chance in hell

🌟 In a nutshell

Does anyone at Ferrari think before they speak? They are checking…

🗓️ What’s coming up…

Consider if you would, these words…

The joy of the famous marque winning the World Endurance Championship for the first time in this iteration as James Calado, Alessandro Pier Guidi and former F1 driver Antonio Giovinazzi brought home the title in Bahrain was quickly met with a double DNF as Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc failed to finish at Interlagos. The disaster in Brazil was their third non-classified finish of the season, with a double DSQ in China and a crash out in Zandvoort, leading to one of the images of the season with Leclerc.

It all seemed to start so well. While Jack Whitehall was cringing his way through F1 75, Hamilton and Leclerc were playing chess against each other. Early-season promise from Hamilton winning the Shanghai sprint was a false dawn as his first Ferrari season has not yet led to a podium, fourth places coming four times as Leclerc took one of the steps on the podium seven times without a Ferrari Grand Prix win so far in 2025. 

It’s not like they’ve been terrible. If you go back to the pandemic, Ferrari finished sixth with Sebastian Vettel being a sad boy passing the torch to Leclerc, while you need to go far further back, back to the days of Jody Scheckter and Gilles Villeneuve finishing 10th in 1980 for true mediocrity. After Brazil, Ferrari are fourth, tussing with Red Bull and Mercedes for second while McLaren sail away and Williams watch on the edges.

And while McLaren have dominated, it’s important to remember that they’re doing so as a customer team. As  one of the few teams that build everything, they have not been outmatched over the season by their customers. Mercedes have done well, but McLaren are showing them how good it could be. The likes of Haas and Sauber are showing Ferrari the worse scenario.

There have been high-profile issues between the Scuderia. We are checking has become a meme. Hamilton, the sport’s bellwether, oscillates between hyper focus and apathy. Leclerc often sounds like he’d be happier elsewhere. This is a team that could and perhaps should be second in the Teams’ championship, but as it stands, they are four points behind Red Bull and if it stays like this, they would miss out on an extra $20-30 million, although this is offset by the payment they get for merely being Ferrari.

So to go back to Elkann’s comments, the timing of them is utterly bizarre. This should be a time of celebration for Ferrari’s Hypercar programme. They came back to elite endurance racing for the first time since 1973, and in just three seasons, took the title. That, by anyone’s standards, is incredible. No one expects Cadillac, for example, to be winning the F1 title within three years (right?).

And Elkann appears to be offering the sort of motivational speech only a chairman can provide. Beatings will continue until morale improves is perhaps not the best way to inspire a seven-time world champion who transcends the sport and a pair of drivers most teams would build their entire racing programs around.

And saying that their drivers should talk less is a disastrous thing to say publicly when Lewis Hamilton is one of your drivers. Part of Hamilton’s career has been being one of the few drivers to speak out on different issues. Elkann’s phrasing is clumsy at best and utterly awful at worst. To me, 2025 felt like a transitional year for the team, with Hamilton learning the car, the team and the language ahead of a proper challenge in 2026 as he looks for the elusive eighth title, but with his ill-chosen words, Ferrari are at risk of tanking the first new season of the regulations before it has even begun. 

And, what of Elkann? He took over as Ferrari chair in 2018, and has yet to finish first in the Drivers or Constructors’ championship during his reign. “When Ferrari is a team, we win” but maybe questions should be asked about their title drought which is heading towards 20 years, the longest drought in the team’s history. They’ve thrown the kitchen sink at winning, but while the people at the top are disconnected from the team’s highest profile employees, they’re not giving themselves the best chance to win.

After Ferrari’s disaster in Brazil, F1 gets a week off before they move to Las Vegas for their third and final trip to the USA in 2025. 52 of the team’s points have been scored in America so far by Ferrari. Red Bull have 57 and Mercedes have 46. Ferrari’s 2025 turning point may not come in America as they chase second while also ensuring that the 2026 edition of Scuderia drama is competitive. When Ferrari is a team, we win, but is the entire team aiming at the same goals?

📖 Good reads

News you may have missed…

This stunning image of Gabriel Bortoleto’s car after his Sprint race crash shows how far F1 safety has come.

We now know that Red Bull Racing and RB will launch their seasons in Detroit, with an event scheduled for January 15

This experimental video is a great way to display a pitstop…

Jenson Button has officially retired

Jodie Writes Racing has profiled the newbies on the Formula E grid, while Nikola Tsolov will replace Pepe Marti for the last two Formula 2 weekends.

🪦 The headline reference 

All the headlines in 2025 are wrestling references.

No Chance in Hell was the theme used by Vince McMahon and the Corporation. It was the anthem of authority, and as the intro started, so did the boos of a crowd going after a toxic boss.

Thanks for reading