This weekend at the Red Bull Ring Ferrari has a new floor available. This is the last major item of the 2025 car to be produced in the wind tunnel which is now devoted full-time to the 2026 car.

For Silverstone the following week it is expected that the Ferrari will also have its revised rear suspension.

It is hoped that the combination of the two updates will more comfortably allow the SF-25 to be run as low as in the opening two races. Only at Monaco, where the absence of high-speed sections meant the car could run an uncompromised ride height, has the car been fully competitive since it was disqualified from the results of Race 2 in China for excessive plank wear.

But in the last two races of Spain and Canada it has enjoyed something of a mini-revival of form on race day. A look at the pattern of Charles Leclerc’s race around Barcelona offers some clues as to why. Once the Ferrari pitwall had moved Lewis Hamilton aside for him, Leclerc had seven consecutive clear air laps before his first pitstop, running the same tyre compound as race leader Oscar Piastri. His average deficit to Piastri for those seven laps was 0.46sec. Which – Monaco aside — is a pretty standard sort of shortfall for this car since having to run its higher ride height, post-China.

But the second stints of Piastri and Leclerc — on the same medium compound tyre and doing the same planned two-stop strategy – overlapped for 16 laps, during which time Leclerc averaged just 0.27sec slower.

It’s not exactly a like-for-like comparison, but it’s a big enough difference to suggest that Leclerc was running the early part of his race at a deliberately slower pace than the middle part. A later radio communication requesting Leclerc to lift-and-coast was not about fuel or brake consumption — but to save on plank wear. So rather than running a much higher ride height than the car’s floor had been designed for — as had been the case between China and Imola — it looks like Ferrari had clawed at least some of its shortfall back by reducing ride height towards its early-season window but then having the driver control how much he was taking from the plank by not attacking the high-speed braking areas. This would explain the early cautious pace when the car was loaded with fuel, the more aggressive mid-race pace when the lower ride height could be more fully exploited without so much plank wear — and the later instruction in the early part of the final stint to back off.

It’s been just a work-around for the built-in limitation of this floor/rear suspension combination but it allowed Leclerc to make the podium in Spain and to show some real speed in between incidents in Montreal.