Following a disastrous performance at the Qatar Grand Prix, Ferrari regained its form in the season-closing race at Abu Dhabi, with team boss Fred Vasseur having explained that it was possible “by making very big changes to the cars.”
Following a tough start to the weekend, Ferrari delivered a significantly improved performance on Sunday. Charles Leclerc started from fifth on the grid, but he immediately managed to pick off George Russell to move up into fourth place.
The Monegasque then kept the title favourite honest for the majority of the race. However, despite getting relatively close to Norris midway through the race, he was unable to mount an attack and missed out on a podium finish.
His team-mate, Lewis Hamilton suffered a shock early exit in qualifying by having been eliminated in Q1 for the third consecutive time. The Briton elected to start on the softs which enabled him to make up a few positions in the opening stages of the race.
He then made an early switch to the hard tyre. Although he dropped to the back of the field after his early stop, he made a series of overtaking manoeuvres to climb up the field.
His second stop saw him drop back again as he rejoined the track in P19. However, he was extremely quick once again, making up places after places, but his tyres started to lose grip in the closing stages of the race which meant he was unable to pick off Esteban Ocon and Fernando Alonso and had to settle for an eighth place.
Reflecting on the title showdown in Abu Dhabi, Ferrari team boss Fred Vasseur added: “First of all congratulations to Lando on winning the title. Ever since his days in karting it was obvious that he has a special talent and this title is well deserved and well done also to McLaren for giving him the equipment to get the job done.
Turning his attention to Ferrari’s own performance, Vasseur was left to praise the Scuderia for having completely overhauled the set-up of the SF25 following Friday’s practice session, which enabled Leclerc and Hamilton to end the season on a high on the back of a disastrous weekend in Lusail.
“Overall, this has not been a bad weekend for us in terms of pure performance, but it came a bit too late following a very tough start on Friday after which the team at the track and back in the factory did a very good job to recover for Saturday, by making very big changes to the cars.”
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“However, when you have to recover like this, it’s all about fine tuning the details and we weren’t able to do that. That affected our qualifying as the field was so close and then today our race pace was good and with Charles we were matching Lando’s pace, but in the current F1 where the gaps are so small, if you leave anything on the table you pay the price.
“Lewis also had a good race with very strong pace, he pulled off some nice overtaking moves and the motivation was there. But across the whole team, if we want better results we must work on having better weekends from the start of practice.”
Although Ferrari ended the 2024 season in great form, with both Leclerc and his then team-mate Carlos Sainz having clinched victories in the closing part of last year, the Scuderia was unable to build on that momentum, and fell back in the pecking order.
“I want to thank everyone in the team at the track and all the people back in Maranello for all their hard work all year and of course thanks also to the Tifosi for their support this season, because even when we were struggling, and we had some very tough weekends, they were always behind us, always supportive and you can’t imagine the positive energy this has given us throughout all the year.”