Ferrari Technical Director (Chassis) Loic Serra has revealed the team has put “a lot of work” into improving its qualifying performance but not at the risk of affecting the race pace of its 2025 Formula 1 machine.
The Scuderia has had a knack of late for producing one-lap F1 weapons that suffer in race conditions.
In the ground effect era alone, Ferrari has had 23 pole positions compared to 10 race victories across three seasons, with 2023’s SF-23 particularly poor at tyre management.
However, the tide turned in the other direction last year and although the SF-24 was poor at tyre warm-up, negatively affecting its one-lap pace, the Scuderia scored more race victories than pole positions for the first time since 2017.
Speaking to select media including Motorsport Week after the unveiling of the SF-25, Serra spoke of the necessity to improve by valuable “milliseconds” over one lap with Ferrari’s 2025 F1 car in order to gain vital grid positions, but not at the expense of the race pace it conjured last year.
“I think the long-run strength of the car, you want to retain and you want to improve,” Serra explained.
“And it is true that if you can get a bit more of the first lap performance, you’ll take it, especially where 30 milliseconds is more or less one position.
“That 30 milliseconds is not much when you think about the tyres on one lap, it can give you way more than that.
“So, yes, there’s a lot of work that is going into that and hopefully it will help, but that’s a relative gain. It will also depend on what the other teams do.”
Why Ferrari is chasing those ‘30 milliseconds’?
The 2024 F1 season was one of the most competitive in recent memory with Ferrari among four winning teams that included McLaren, Red Bull and Mercedes.
Competing for wins wasn’t the most intense battleground however and it was largely dictated by the ferociously tight margins in qualifying.
At the 2024 finale in Abu Dhabi, second through 10th on the grid was covered by just four-tenths of a second and Ferrari’s former driver Carlos Sainz was two-hundredths away from putting the Scuderia on the front row.
For the majority of last year’s campaign, it was down to a few tenths to settle pole position from the third or even fourth row of the grid and with overtaking still at a premium in Grand Prix racing, that track position was vital.
Despite Ferrari’s impressive long-run pace, the slightest mishap in qualifying, combined with its difficulties in tyre warm-up had the ability to push the team out of victory contention prior to lights out.
This is why, as Serra said “a lot of effort” has been put into chasing those final milliseconds, but the risk of losing that race pace the Italian squad has only recently attained, cannot be understated either.
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