04/05/2025 11:00
Lewis Hamilton has delivered a damning indictment about Ferrari's
current form in F1, after failing to reach the final stage of
qualifying for the Miami Grand Prix. The British driver slumped out
of the grid-setting session in Q2, before highlighting how the
Italian team is now battling Williams, not the front-running rivals
the Scuderia was expected to fight this season. With McLaren,
Mercedes and the Red Bull of Max Verstappen all looking strong at
the Miami International Autodrome, the Maranello-based squad looked
resigned to settling for fourth quickest, but it has not been able
to even compete with those teams. Charles Leclerc, in the other
Ferrari, did make it through to Q3, but found himself out-performed
by the Williams duo of Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon, slotting in
directly behind the pair in eighth. Despite his lacklustre
qualifying session, Hamilton scored a strong third-place finish in
the sprint, working his way up from seventh on the grid (de facto
sixth after his team-mate aquaplaned into the wall and failed to
start). However, the seven-time F1 drivers' champion explained how
the strategy call to come in for slick tyres early, as the track
dried, masked the underlying pace of the SF-25. "Yeah, definitely"
the 105-time grand prix winner replied to media, including
RacingNews365 , when it was put to him that his sprint podium must
have been a confidence boost. "It's nice, but pure pace, we're
being out-qualified by the Williams, who are doing a great job -
James [Vowles, Williams team principal] and his team are doing an
amazing job... But pure pace, that's where we are." Painful
misjudgement It has been a difficult start to life at Ferrari for
Hamilton, who has struggled to match Leclerc for much of the
campaign, but the pair were much closer during qualifying in
Florida. Although the British driver will line up P12, there were
less than six-hundredths of a second separating them in Q2. When
reflecting on that, the 40-year-old revealed a costly mistake made
by Ferrari, a blunder that heavily contributed to him being dumped
out the grid-settings session early. "Charles was fortunate to get
through with that [effort in Q2]," he recounted. "I think he did a
new tyre [run], so just got it through. "I had an extra new tyre
[set available, too]. We should have used that."
