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After a weekend in Monaco where Red Bull's strategy left Ferrari reeling, the Reds suffered another setback in Azerbaijan. This time, recurring reliability issues were to blame.
The real drama unfolding in the paddock concerns not only who is fastest over a single lap, but also a car that feels more like a roller coaster than a race machine, and the consequences this has for its drivers and championship hopes. Since the start of the season in Bahrain, the red Scuderia has been haunted by a problem that has resurfaced from the past of ground effect in the sport: porpoising. The violent vertical oscillations that first affected the 2022 cars have become a daily nightmare for Lewis Hamilton, who warned that these incessant bounces can wreak havoc on drivers' backs, and Pierre Gasly, who pointed out the long-term health risks despite the athletes' exceptional physical condition. George Russell even suggested that this phenomenon could cause accidents, wondering how it is possible to drive a car that is constantly being shaken up and down at over 300 km/h.
Ferrari's struggles with this issue reflect its overall disappointing season. The Maranello chassis can still reach blistering speeds—Charles Leclerc has secured six pole positions in eight Grand Prix races, including four in a row—but the car's fragility has turned these flashes of genius into fleeting moments. After a promising start in Bahrain that had the tifosi dreaming of a double title, the team's luck ran out in Azerbaijan. A 44-point defeat to Red Bull relegated Ferrari to second place in the constructors' standings, but the 80-point gap makes even a podium finish uncertain.
In the drivers' championship, Leclerc's initial lead has evaporated. He arrived in Miami with a 19-point lead over Max Verstappen and a 38-point lead over Sergio Pérez, but after three races, he has accumulated only 14 points, slipping to third place, 34 points behind Verstappen and 13 points behind Pérez. His teammate, Carlos Sainz, languishes in a mediocre fifth place, behind George Russell—whose 2022 car has been deemed faulty—despite the Italian's reputation for consistency. Four of the eight races contested so far have been marred by Ferrari's mistakes: driver errors, overly optimistic strategies, and, more seriously, a series of technical failures. This trend suggests that even the current second place is fragile. The porpoising dilemma is not new. In 1982, Patrick Tambay was forced to retire from the Swiss Grand Prix after suffering a herniated disc caused by the same violent bouncing of his Ferrari. Today, the problem has resurfaced with modern aerodynamics, amplified by the postponement of the implementation of the 2022 technical regulations, a delay largely attributed to the pandemic, which gave teams an extra year to perfect ground effect designs but also prolonged the period during which the problem was able to worsen.
As the season progresses, the question in this sport is not only which team will cross the finish line first, but also which will survive these incessant vertical shocks without compromising driver safety. For Ferrari, the answer could determine whether its spectacular pace in qualifying will ever translate into race wins, or whether the prancing horse will continue to stumble under the weight of its own technical ambitions.
