Ferrari’s Chinese Grand Prix weekend went from triumph to despair as Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc were disqualified from the main race after their cars failed post-race technical checks.
Twenty-four hours after Hamilton took a morale-boosting victory in Saturday’s sprint race to get his career in red up and running – the seven-time world champion hitting back at “yapping critics” for having doubted him – the Scuderia made not one but two basic errors which proved extremely costly.
Why was Hamilton disqualified?
First, the underfloor plank of Hamilton’s car – part of an assembly which includes titanium skid blocks to maintain a minimum ride height and prevent cars from being too low to the ground – was found to have excessive wear when it was measured after the race, 0.5mm below the limit. Then Leclerc’s car was found to be underweight, as was the machine belonging to Alpine’s Pierre Gasly. All three drivers were disqualified.
Leclerc and Hamilton lost their fifth- and sixth-place finishes as a result, worth 10 points and eight points respectively. Gasly had finished out of the points in 11th.
It had already been a difficult day for Ferrari even before the disqualifications. Leclerc tore off his front wing endplate in an opening-lap tussle with Hamilton, who started just in front of him in fifth.
Despite having a section of his car missing throughout the whole race, the driver from Monaco still demonstrated superior speed compared to his rival. Midway through the competition, Hamilton acknowledged his loss and informed his crew that he would let Leclerc overtake him instead of impeding his progress further.
For Hamilton, being disqualified would likely evoke recollections of Austin 2023 when his Mercedes was also excluded from the race for similar reasons.
Vasseur praises Hamilton ‘maturity’
Ferrari stated in an official announcement that they had "no desire to obtain any benefit."
Today, Charles adopted a one-stop approach which led to significant tyre degradation, making the car less competitive," the Italian team stated. "As for Lewis, our estimation of tread wear was slightly off target.
“There was no intention to gain any advantage. We will learn from what happened today and make sure we don’t make the same mistakes again. Clearly it’s not the way we wanted to end our Chinese GP weekend, neither for ourselves, nor for our fans whose support for us is unwavering.”
Hamilton, who endured a disastrous Ferrari debut in Melbourne the previous weekend, looked to have bounced back in Shanghai. But he cut a despondent figure afterwards.
“We didn’t really have a battle,” Hamilton said of his decision to let Leclerc past, a call which was praised by Ferrari team principal Frédéric Vasseur as “mature”. “He just had more pace than me. I was struggling with the car so I told the team to let him by. It was my idea.”
Asked what had changed between the sprint race and the main grand prix, Hamilton added: “I mean, we both made setup changes and one particular [change] I think was the wrong one for us. We both had it. But for me the balance was completely different. The [performance] window is quite narrow. But there is performance there, I think. I definitely take more positives [than negatives] from the weekend.”
Red Bull weigh up ditching Lawson
Meanwhile, Red Bull are understood to be considering switching rookie Liam Lawson with Racing Bulls driver Yuki Tsunoda as early as the next race weekend in Suzuka.
Lawson endured another difficult weekend as Max Verstappen’s new team-mate in the main Red Bull team. After crashing out in Melbourne, Lawson qualified 20th and last in both the sprint race and the feature race in China. The 23-year-old managed to recover to 15th but looks devoid of confidence.
The team are weighing up a number of factors including whether they think Lawson can improve sufficiently, what it might do to his career to pull him out of the second Red Bull so quickly, and whether Tsunoda might suffer the same fate as the Kiwi if he switched, thereby destroying his confidence as well.
Asked whether he would agree to swap places with Lawson in Suzuka, Tsunoda replied: “Japan? Yeah, 100 per cent. The Red Bull car is faster.”
Disqualification harsh, but correct decision
Lewis Hamilton’s disqualification from the Chinese Grand Prix because of excessive plank wear would have come as a shock to both driver and his Ferrari team. It is not the first time this has happened to the seven-time champion, but generally these instances are rare.
At times, some of the FIA technical regulations can seem obscure to the viewing public. They are in place for a good reason, though. The introduction of ‘planks’ underneath the cars – so called because they resemble a piece of timber though are made from high-density resin-bonded material – was to stop teams running their cars so close to the ground that they would bottom out. This was thought to be a contributing factor to Ayrton Senna’s fatal accident at Imola in 1994.
The planks and the regulation of their thickness before and after the race in effect mean a team has to run a car high enough to stop the car bottoming out. The plank itself is 300mm wide and 10mm thick. During a race it can be worn down to 9mm thickness, being measured in specific areas by the FIA. Hamilton’s plank was down to 8.5mm thickness, causing his disqualification.
To wear more than 1mm away from the plank means the car must have been hitting the ground hard for a prolonged period of time. You could say that the 0.5mm or so difference is not much but that equates to perhaps raising the ride height at the rear by 2mm or 3mm to stop this happening and keep the car legal. That would affect performance, as the lower the car is to the ground the better.
As I have written about before, these ground-effect F1 cars respond to ride height very critically. Ferrari blamed their drop-off in performance in Australia on the fact that they had to raise their ride heights from Friday to Saturday.
So what went wrong?
How did excessive wear happen in China, then? A sprint weekend, with limited practice sessions, means teams do not undertake much running on high fuel loads. Getting a reading on the plank wear when you do run high fuel is critical. They would have taken a measurement after the sprint race but that is only run on one-third fuel, being one-third of the grand prix distance. Ferrari obviously screwed up here and owned up to their error after the disqualification.
A curious aspect of Ferrari’s weekend was that Hamilton took pole position and won the sprint race by seven seconds, yet could only qualify fifth and finish sixth on the road in the main race. I would not be surprised if some of their performance was lost through raising the ride height of Hamilton’s car after the sprint.
Perhaps Ferrari checked the plank wear after the sprint and realised it was marginally legal and chose to change the set-up and raise the ride height. That would have lost him performance – he was actually faster in sprint qualifying than main qualifying, which is unusual. It does not take much to lose a tenth of a second or two with the ride-height effect. If this was the case, the change they made was not big enough and they and Hamilton paid the price.
What about Leclerc?
Charles Leclerc in the other Ferrari was also disqualified but for his car being 1kg under the 800kg minimum weight post-race. In reality his car was ‘underweight’ for the whole race because he lost a front wing endplate on the first lap after colliding with Hamilton. Yet this was not the reason for his disqualification as the FIA regulations allow the team to fit the car with a replacement equivalent front wing when it is weighed. However, he was still found to be under the limit.
One kilogram from 800kg is not an enormous amount (just 0.125 per cent the wrong way) and would not equate to a great deal of lap time. The most likely cause was the race turning out to be an unexpected one-stop strategy. That meant the teams ran their final stint on the hard tyres for far longer than they believed they would. The 1kg weight difference would have likely been simply from the tyres losing more rubber over the 41 laps Leclerc did on them.
Another strange aspect of Ferrari’s weekend was that Leclerc was faster than Hamilton despite his broken wing. The team said he would have lost downforce and that is true. Yet it would likely have been a performance gain overall because the car is a little lighter, but more significantly aerodynamically improved.
As we saw on TV, Leclerc’s front wing ran much closer to the ground at high speed, which is what you want on these ground-effect cars. The missing endplate would have also likely pushed the airflow outwards when it hit the front tyre, rather than inwards and back under the car. That is ideal because if you get ‘inwash’ rather than ‘outwash’ it disrupts the airflow over the other surfaces. That likely explains at least some of Leclerc’s pace advantage over Hamilton.
Ferrari need to look at this performance advantage (or perhaps disadvantage) in detail, as there might be something to learn from it. They also need to reduce the errors they seem to be making on simple set-up procedures, otherwise they could be throwing away another season.
Ferrari’s blunder-filled start to new season
Frédéric Vasseur has managed to turn Ferrari into a serious outfit that contends for championships again. Yet the opening two races of the 2025 season has been a return to the chaotic “bad old days” at Ferrari with operational and strategic errors aplenty.
Australian GP strategy blunder
After qualifying a disappointing seventh and eighth, Ferrari have an opportunity to make ground as the rain comes in Melbourne. They choose to leave not one but both of their drivers out on slick tyres in heavy rain. They pay the price, as Hamilton falls back and Leclerc spins.
Communication breakdown
Whilst Hamilton’s radio messages with his race engineer Riccardo Adami were respectful in Australia, there did seem to be a gap in communication . Hamilton asked for less information, he got more information. He then asked for more and got less. Work is needed.
Regression in China after sprint win
Credit to Ferrari and Hamilton for pole and victory in the sprint in Shanghai. However, when it came to qualifying and the main race, there was little sign of that pace. Set-up changes made between those sessions put him a long way from the pace of the McLarens.
An unusual strategy call
Hamilton was the only one of the frontrunners to stop twice in China. Whilst he would likely have been overtaken by Max Verstappen for fifth anyway, the fact that he was clearly the slowest of the top six (even with his team-mate’s broken front wing) was a worrying sign.
Ultimate disqualification
Nevertheless, accumulating eight points during the sprint and another eight in the main race wasn’t exactly disastrous; it did represent an upgrade compared to the previous weekend. However, Lewis Hamilton ultimately returned home without scoring any points following his exclusion from the Grand Prix due to excessive wear of the car’s plank. As usual, one could blame Ferrari for this issue.
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