March 24, 2025
They say a week is a long time in politics, but it’s an eternity in Formula 1. On Saturday, Lewis Hamilton dominated the sprint race in Shanghai, taking his first victory in Ferrari red and reminding the world that while form may be temporary, class is permanent. Perhaps McLaren would have a title fight on their hands after all, we thought.
The following day, his nascent challenge literally hit the skids. Hamilton never had the pace to even think about repeating his sprint race victory, and was eventually disqualified from sixth after his rear skid blocks were found to have worn half a millimetre too much (theoretically providing a performance advantage by allowing the car to run closer to the ground than it otherwise would). As if that weren’t embarrassing enough for the Scuderia, team-mate Charles Leclerc, who finished one place ahead of Hamilton on the road, was himself disqualified when his car turned out to be 1kg underweight. Ferrari therefore left Shanghai with no points from the main Chinese Grand Prix – and a mammoth sixty-one point deficit to McLaren in the constructor’s championship.
How did it happen? According to Ferrari’s post-race statement, both disqualifications were caused by simple human error: the engineers got their sums wrong. Their mistakes are even more galling when you consider that, as Stuart Codling pointed out for Autosport, other teams have been caught out in similar situations in the past, and one might have expected Ferrari to learn lessons from these precedents. Given the way operational errors have blighted their championship campaigns in recent years, it’s not surprising that the motorsport press has been quick to accuse the Italian team of yet another costly strategic blunder. Certainly, there can be no doubt that they had a terrible day at the office.
The whole débacle leaves Ferrari with a mountain to climb if they are to deliver any sort of championship challenge, but it also highlights why elite motorsport is arguably the greatest team sport ever invented. Motorsport is an extremely high-tech environment, but in the end, success still depends on human beings pushing their limits. There has been a lot of fuss about the arrival of AI in elite sport around the world, but a sport in which the outcome is decided by AI is a scientific experiment, not a sport – and no-one pays to watch a scientific experiment.
Indeed, motorsport arguably has more of that human element than any other sport. Yes, there is only one driver in the car, and it might look like the drivers do battle on their own, but nothing could be further from the truth. A team like Ferrari or Mercedes that builds its own engines employs well over 1,000 people directly, not to mention thousands more in the supply chain, sponsorship, logistics, etc. All of them play a part in the team’s performance, and winning means getting them all working seamlessly together. It’s not a coincidence that overhauling of a Grand Prix team is often likened to turning an oil tanker.
No-one wants to see the result of a race decided in the stewards’ room, but Ferrari’s travails yesterday are par for the course in a sport that is fundamentally about people even more than technology. In motorsport as in life, mistakes are inevitable: the trick is to learn from them and come back stronger. How Ferrari respond to that challenge will be one of the big stories to watch when the circus arrives at Suzuka in a fortnight’s time.
