Ferrari’s F1 Superteam Gets Left in the Dust
With seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton behind the wheel, this was supposed to be the year the most storied team in motor racing got back on top. Instead it’s turned into a complete nightmare.
The Italian Grand Prix at Monza is a Ferrari celebration, but the team is struggling this season.
Ferrari signed Lewis Hamilton, but the team has not met expectations, with internal issues and car troubles.
Despite challenges, Ferrari hopes home support in Italy will boost confidence, even with Hamilton’s penalty.
Officially, the Italian Grand Prix is the 16th race on the Formula One calendar, a late-summer stop between an event in the Netherlands and one in Azerbaijan.
But inside the sport, everyone knows that the trip to the outskirts of Milan represents much more than that.
The annual visit to Monza is a celebration of all things Ferrari—an unapologetically Italian festival dedicated to the most storied, most glamorous team in motor racing. The tide of expectant tifosi, the home fans who live and die with the team, washes over the ancient circuit, bathing the whole place in red.
Except this year, the local faithful arrived feeling more anxious than usual. That’s because Ferrari’s season has turned into a complete nightmare.
The team, which hasn’t won a constructors’ title since 2008, is in the longest championship drought in its history. Its drivers haven’t managed a single race victory this season. And at the most recent Grand Prix, last week in Zandvoort, neither of its two cars made it to the finish line.
Monza was supposed to be a return to Ferrari’s happy place. This weekend, it’s more like coming home with a report card full of Fs.
“For sure, it’s not the best preparation,” team principal Frederic Vasseur said after watching both of his cars crash out last week. “But on the other hand we don’t need to have extra motivation for Monza.”
What the team does need is results. Ferrari started the season with more fanfare than any outfit in F1 history after signing seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton. Pulling on the famous red overalls for the first time, he spoke about living out every driver’s childhood dream. And, as he launched his bid for a record eighth championship, he had every reason to believe that his Ferrari would be competitive.
The Scuderia, as the team is known, had just finished a close second in the constructors’ championship. After years of frustration, Ferrari finally seemed to be on the right track.
The first two-thirds of the 2025 campaign have proven otherwise. Not only is Hamilton miles from contention in the drivers’ standings, where he sits in sixth place. The man who holds the all-time record for race wins isn’t even posting the best results on his own team. Ferrari’s other driver, Charles Leclerc, has finished ahead of Hamilton in all but two of the 14 races that both cars have completed.
The nadir for Hamilton came at the Hungarian Grand Prix last month when he didn’t even make it out of the second round of qualifying.
“I’m useless, absolutely useless,” he said at the time. “Just drove terribly.”
The sad state of affairs was so depressing that Hamilton, now 40, even suggested that Ferrari would need to replace him—although the team has no such designs.
More urgent is Ferrari’s desperation for some consistency. All season, the cars have dealt with issues surrounding the distance between the floor of the car and the track, known as the ride height, leaving the drivers to spend as much time battling their own machines as the rest of the field. The team has also had its fair share of pratfalls due to internal disagreements over in-race strategy. The latest blowup came in the Netherlands where Leclerc openly second-guessed his bosses over the radio.
“We are so f—unlucky!” he yelled in the middle of the race for all to hear. “Unbelievable!”
Yet Leclerc knows that the reasons McLaren has racked up more than twice as many points as Ferrari this year go far beyond rotten luck or the odd misstep. The title fight is already over and there is no telling how competitive the team might be next season, when the introduction of wholesale changes to the sport’s technical regulations could shake up the field. Mercedes, for instance, is widely believed to be leading the way in 2026 development.
In the meantime, Ferrari can only do its best to soak in some love at home, the one place where F1 fans still see everything through red-colored spectacles. That much was clear on Wednesday as Hamilton and Leclerc greeted a throng of tifosi from a balcony overlooking Milan’s Piazzetta Reale in a scene orchestrated to echo a papal audience.
“Being a Ferrari driver is the most special thing ever,” Hamilton said.
Hamilton rewarding the supporters’ faith with a win will be unlikely on Sunday, when he will start with a five-place grid penalty. But the lift of returning to Italy is undeniable: in Friday’s first practice session, the Ferraris were the quickest car on track.
“Trust me, when they are in front of the crowd in Milano and you have thousands and thousands of people pushing for the team,” Vasseur said, “this is a mega-huge push in terms of self-confidence.”