06/04/2025
NEWS STORY
Scuderia Ferrari HP leaves Suzuka with 18 points in the bag, its biggest race tally in this far from easy start to the season, courtesy of a fourth place finish from Charles Leclerc and a seventh from Lewis Hamilton, at what was a solitary race for both of them.
The race was entirely in the dry, after rain stopped mid-morning and the team put its drivers on different strategies, which resulted in Leclerc finishing where he started and Hamilton making up one place.
Charles started on Medium tyres, Lewis on Hards and they both maintained position on the opening lap. On lap 6, Hamilton passed Isack Hadjar at turn 1 to go seventh. The leaders began pitting on lap 19, with Leclerc stopping for Hard tyres on lap 21, rejoining in tenth place. He was soon back up to fourth after the run of pit stops. Lewis stayed out until lap 30, running as high as second, behind Kimi Antonelli. He took on Medium tyres and was seventh again. Nothing much changed in the second half of the race, with Charles running at a reasonable pace, but he was losing a few tenths a lap to Max Verstappen in the Red Bull and the McLaren duo of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, so he was unable to mount an attack for a podium finish. As for Lewis, he tussled with Antonelli for a few laps, but then, on his Mediums, began to struggle more than the Italian and had to settle for taking the flag in seventh place.
With two or three tenths of a second making the difference between fighting for the win or being down in the midfield in Formula 1 at the moment, the team will be working hard with the aim of getting more out of the car package. The SF-25 needs to be better balanced and tyre management also requires work. A chance to improve presents itself immediately as the World Championship moves on to Bahrain next week for round 4.
Charles Leclerc: It was a bit of a lonely race for me today. P4 is not a result we are ever satisfied with, but looking at the positives of this weekend, the work we did on Friday in terms of set-up adjustment and the learnings we take into the next races have paid off. We made good progress, but we have to keep our heads down and keep working before we come to any conclusions. The front runners still have quite an advantage in terms of pace. For now, we have to focus on maximizing the points we bring home, which we did today, and hopefully later in the season we can fight for the top positions.
Lewis Hamilton: That was a tough race for us today. We didn't have the pace to challenge the top three, and that's something we'll be working hard to address ahead of the next rounds. I went with a setup that felt good overall, but it just didn't give me everything I needed out there. The team's been doing an incredible job, and we'll keep pushing together to find those gains.
The fans have been amazing all weekend - their energy and support means a lot.
Fred Vasseur: Today's race result reflected what we saw in qualifying yesterday. With the car that we had we probably could not have done more. We were two to three tenths off the quickest in qualifying and it was pretty much the same today in the race.
We are struggling with some aspects and we must keep working to try and extract more from the car for Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. We know there is room for improvement and we need to work on car balance and tyres management. For next week in Bahrain, we and in fact all the teams, will have some baseline data from pre-season testing, so we will be able to get a clearer picture of where we stand and of what we need to do to improve.
Check out our Sunday gallery from Suzuka here.