Having secured only P8 on the grid for tomorrow’s Japanese Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton admitted that the Scuderia is running a higher ride-height on their car this weekend, as a result of their disqualifications a fortnight ago in China.
Ferrari endured mixed fortunes on qualifying day at the Japanese Grand Prix. Although Charles Leclerc qualified P4 on the grid, he was unable to challenge Red Bull and McLaren in Q3.
His team mate Lewis Hamilton will start the Japanese Grand Prix from the fourth row of the grid, having failed to extract the maximum from his SF-25 in the dying stages of qualifying. On his fastest lap, the Briton’s second sector was not the best and that left him in eighth place.
Reflecting on his third qualifying with Ferrari, Hamilton said: “Not good enough from my side, P8 is not great. It was a challenging Saturday for us. We made some changes to the car ahead of qualifying which, unfortunately, didn’t deliver the improvements we were aiming for.
“The car felt more balanced in the earlier stages, but I experienced significant understeer in Q3 which led to a couple of small mistakes that cost us. Charles did a great lap. I had a lot of understeer and couldn’t dial it up for qualifying.”
“This result isn’t a true reflection of the car’s potential. There’s performance to be found and the team has been working incredibly hard behind the scenes. We’ll analyse the data overnight and do everything we can to come back stronger in the race.”
The seven-time F1 champion has revealed that Ferrari are running a higher ride-height on their car this weekend, as a result of their disqualifications a fortnight ago in China.
“We are running higher than we’d like. I don’t know if everyone is in the same boat in that respect, it’s higher than we want to be from the weekend before,” concluded Hamilton.
A morning with our Japanese Tifosi 🫶 🇯🇵 pic.twitter.com/gjZFf0j7Sd
— Scuderia Ferrari HP (@ScuderiaFerrari) April 5, 2025
Ferrari’s team boss Fred Vasseur has been left with mixed emotions, but he insisted that the Scuderia has made a step forward in qualifying compared to the opening two rounds in Melbourne and Shanghai.
“It was a decent quali for Charles, even if I feel we were in the game from the start and then didn’t put everything together in Q3. Lewis struggled a bit more there, after having a similar pace to Charles in Q1 and Q2. McLaren is still a step ahead, so we must continue to push to develop the car more.
“It is difficult to predict what we can do in the race, as the forecast is for rain, at least overnight, which could be our first experience of a wet track this weekend. Even if it’s dry, but the wind changes direction, here at Suzuka that means we will find a very different track.
“Overall, I feel we made a step ahead in qualifying and we must continue to work in this direction in the race to reach the targets we have set ourselves,” concluded the Frenchman.
