Stop the count!
Donald Trump’s peculiar Tweet during the 2020 United States presidential election has long since become a meme. You can imagine, given Ferrari’s double disqualification from the 2025 Chinese Grand Prix, that the Scuderia will be wishing fervently that everyone had just packed up and flown home on the Saturday, after Lewis Hamilton won the sprint race.
Events in China then got rapidly out of hand as Hamilton and Charles Leclerc qualified a mildly disappointed fifth and sixth for the grand prix – where Charles contrived to hit his teammate on the opening lap, and yet managed to be fast enough with a broken front wing for the team to order Lewis to let him past. Hamilton naturally chafed but eventually capitulated, though Leclerc derived little benefit because Max Verstappen caught and passed him anyway during the second stint.
Then both drivers were disqualified for different reasons after the race, just as Leclerc, Hamilton and team boss Frederic Vasseur were trying to accentuate the positives in their various press conferences.
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Both disqualifications were slam dunks to which Ferrari could offer the stewards no defence or mitigation but a mea culpa. Perhaps most damningly, others have suffered similar DSQs in recent history which provided lessons Ferrari ought to have noted.
Photo by: Hector Retamal – AFP – Getty Images
Leclerc, along with Alpine’s Pierre Gasly, was thrown out when his car was found to be slightly below the minimum weight limit of 800kg.
It’s now 30 years since the FIA introduced the current system of having a minimum weight which includes the driver as well as the car. The aim then was to reduce the disadvantages faced by taller and/or heavier drivers, although this didn’t quite work for several reasons.
Firstly, Michael Schumacher thumbed his nose at the rules by turning up to the pre-season weigh-in 8kgs heavier than the last time he’d stood on the FIA’s scales – having drunk water “like an elephant” immediately beforehand, according to his race engineer. That loophole was closed by introducing post-race weigh-ins but there was still an incentive for drivers to be as light as possible: most cars were built well underweight, then brought up to the minimum with ballast weights which could be located strategically around the car to benefit handling balance.
Although there’s less wiggle room now – hence the minimum rising from 595kg in 1995 to 800kg today to account for stronger crash structures, hybrid powertrains, bigger wheels, and so on – most cars on the grid come in below it and carry ballast.
In Leclerc’s case, his car was weighed along with the remains of his endplate, which had been recovered from the track. At this point it was bang on the limit; re-weighed with a spare front wing, it was actually heavier.
Once the mandatory two litres of fuel had been drawn from the tank for testing, though, the car was found to weigh 799kg.
Charles Leclerc, Ferrari
Photo by: Clive Mason/Getty Images
In an official statement the team blamed excessive tyre wear caused by Leclerc being on a one-stop strategy. But while even F1’s official tyre supplier predicted this to be a two-stop race, actually that strategy proved to be an outlier as the new C2 hard compound – unraced before this event – turned out to be more durable than expected.
Even so, Racing Bulls appeared to be the only team unprepared for this eventuality. Hamilton stopped twice, taking on mediums for his final stint, but he had the luxury of being able to do this because he only lost one position on track while doing so.
Last year George Russell was disqualified after finishing first in Belgium for being 1.5kg underweight, and Mercedes’ rationale was similar: he was on a one-stop strategy, Russell had lost weight through sweat, and the car had lost weight through plank and tyre wear.
But in that case the swap to a single-stop strategy was an unplanned one. The majority of the field stuck to two stops and didn’t see it coming.
F1 is a sport of fine margins and cars cannot afford to run heavier than absolutely necessary. But Mercedes inadvertently crossed a line in Spa last year and, as it acknowledged afterwards, it learned from its mistakes.
Other competitors should have learned from this obvious lesson too – and, given that a one-stopper was more of a possibility in Shanghai this weekend, Ferrari had an opportunity to mitigate the effects of tyre wear.
Hamilton’s disqualification will be just as painful because this, too, has happened before – to Lewis himself, in Austin in 2023. Leclerc was disqualified from the same race, for the same reason: excessive skid pad wear.
Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images
At the time, Mercedes and Ferrari said they had been caught out by the “unique combination” of a bumpy track with a sprint weekend format “that minimised the time to set up and check the car before the race”. While China was also a sprint weekend, the freshly resurfaced track was anything but bumpy.
Also, Ferrari changed the set-up of Hamilton’s SF-25 between the sprint race and grand prix qualifying. Lewis complained it “really put the car on a knife-edge” – did these changes contribute to his car bottoming out too much?
Even if not, this was still an own goal. Tellingly, Ferrari offered no mitigation and told the stewards it was a “genuine error”.
“With regard to Lewis’ skid wear, we misjudged the consumption by a small margin,” said a Ferrari team statement. “There was no intention to gain any advantage.”
Under Vasseur, Ferrari has been noticeably less chaotic than in the past. But the events of China show that old habits are difficult to shake…
In this article
Stuart Codling
Formula 1
Ferrari
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