The F1 ride-height puzzle that Ferrari can’t solve

Among the starkest lessons of the 2025 season has been that if you want to win grands prix, you have to adopt extreme solutions – particularly with the way you run the floor, the most important downforce-generator on the car. McLaren offers the proof: the superiority it showed in the first part of the year stemmed precisely from hidden innovations guiding the design of the MCL39.
 
Red Bull’s recent renaissance demonstrates it has belatedly caught on to a similar approach, having wasted the first part of the year (under the previous leadership) fruitlessly accusing McLaren of cheating.
 
Another team that tried to take this path was Ferrari, which adopted a new design philosophy with the SF-25 to overcome the structural limits of the SF-24 – by then at the end of its development potential. To win, it was necessary to go further with bolder choices, and the mechanical and aerodynamic changes were intended to unleash creativity not only during the winter, but also throughout the season.
 
Here lies the paradox: those very modifications, which were supposed to unlock new opportunities, have become a limit on development. The goal was to start the season with a competitive car – but those design choices, which held Ferrari back from the very first races, ultimately stifled its potential for growth over the course of the championship.

It’s no secret the SF-25 is extremely sensitive to variations in ride height. This is an issue common to all ground-effect cars, but in Ferrari’s case this year it has become an even more restrictive factor – one that caused a cascading impact from the very first grand prix in Australia all the way to the most recent races.
 
It was a problem particularly evident at the Circuit of The Americas, a track with some of the most irregular asphalt on the entire calendar, owing to the site having been built on reclaimed swampland that is prone to subsidence.
 
Friday was a case study for Ferrari’s entire season. Regardless of the negativity expressed by the Italian media, the team reacted strongly – both technically and operationally – to a disappointing day.  
 
The problem is that while Ferrari showed excellent data analysis and interpretation through the setup changes and the attention to detail in terms of briefing the drivers on how to prepare on the outlap during qualifying, it was essentially making the best of a bad situation. And this brings us to the root of the problem: the management of ride heights has deeply affected Ferrari’s season, turning into a limitation that cannot be solved.

Managing ride heights is more complex than it seems

There’s a crucial point to understand: it’s not just about how low the car runs. Every single car wears down its skid block differently, even at the same ride height, because each one has its own aerodynamic map. This means that the points where pressure and downforce are generated under the floor are distributed differently from car to car.

Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari

Foto di: Hector Retamal – AFP – Getty Images

It’s no coincidence that the FIA carries out checks on several areas of the skid block, since some zones can come closer to the asphalt than others, with varying load peaks.
 
It’s a delicate balancing act – far more complex than it might seem – which is baked into the very design phase of a Formula 1 car, from mechanics to aerodynamics. Already during pre-season testing, it was clear that Ferrari had tried to shift the balance of the car over the winter, redistributing it through specific choices in chassis design, mechanical layout, and aerodynamics.
 
These three elements – including the redesigned rear suspension, which was further modified during the season – reshaped the pressure zones under the floor in an attempt to make downforce generation more consistent than in the past, thereby unlocking more performance. The problem is that these choices ended up creating an unexpected effect: abnormal skid block wear, something that hadn’t shown up in simulations.

Where teams work to find an advantage

It was former Ferrari engineer Inaki Rueda, now sporting director of Sauber, who explicitly expressed why some teams are finding it harder to manage ride height than others.
 
“I think many teams struggle with wear on the rear section of the skid block,” he said in the FIA-mandated tech briefing during the Austin GP weekend.
 
“But those who manage to distribute it better by shifting it toward the front can run lower than the others. That’s a very smart thing – whoever can do that gains a competitive advantage. You want to generate downforce from the rear, but make sure the point of contact is at the front.”

This is one of the reasons McLaren is generally able to run lower than its rivals without encountering the same limitations – as demonstrated in Barcelona, where the car was porpoising vigorously enough to make it touch the ground through very fast corners. It’s no surprise, then, that team boss Andrea Stella described the car as innovative on multiple fronts – and even Red Bull regained performance by working, among other aspects, on ride heights.

Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari

Foto di: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images

This also explains why the sparks created under the car – produced by the titanium skid plates placed on the forward section of the plank – are only a partial indicator of how low a car is running. The wear on the floor is neither uniform nor consistent among the different cars on the grid, even though teams obviously can’t go too far in the opposite direction either. This is where the need to find a proper balance comes into play.

An issue rooted in the project and difficult to fix

When floor wear becomes too concentrated in a specific area, such as the rear, the team is forced to raise the car, inevitably sacrificing downforce as air is drawn from the sides – some of it turbulent, caused by rear tyre ‘squish’. This problem affected Ferrari particularly at the start of the season, even on circuits where the asphalt was theoretically smoother: clear evidence the Scuderia was trying to run as low as possible to extract every last hundredth of a second from the car.
 
The issue is that this pronounced sensitivity to ride height affects not only how much downforce is generated, but also how the car is set up in other areas, especially the suspension, which can be tuned to be more or less stiff depending on the circuit requirements. The result is a chain reaction that, in extreme cases, can push the car well outside its optimal operating window, leading to a sharp drop in performance – and sometimes forcing mid-race adjustments during pitstops (as in Hungary) or even changes to the racing lines.
 
It’s a problem that stems from the car’s very design and isn’t easy to fix during the season. Ferrari has tried to intervene on both the aerodynamic front, by introducing a new floor, and the mechanical one, in an effort to widen the operating window and regain some margin. But it’s far from a simple task; it requires both time and resources.
 
For this reason – and because it became clear that the initial goals could no longer be met – Maranello decided to halt development of the SF-25 early and focus its efforts on next season’s project.

We want to hear from you!

– The Autosport.com Team