Ferrari owes us more than another beautiful disappointment

The 499P makes the excuses coming out of Ferrari’s F1 season harder to sit through. I know they are different programs. I do not need that explained before I am allowed to enjoy one and be furious with the other.

One red car can make the badge feel like a threat. Another can make it feel like a very expensive promise to revisit the matter next year. Supporting Ferrari means paying emotional rent in both buildings.

Charles cannot keep being the consolation prize

Seven Grand Prix podiums for Leclerc in 2025. None for Hamilton. No Grand Prix win for the team. Leclerc also won the qualifying comparison 19–5. [1] Those numbers give the teammate argument plenty to chew on, but the part that irritates me is what we keep asking Charles’s good weekends to compensate for.

He produces something worth getting excited about, and suddenly we are meant to feel better about the larger situation. There is our flash of possibility. There is the reason to keep believing. There is another weekend where the evidence that he can do something special becomes the explanation for why we should tolerate less.

I want his best work spent fighting for wins. Admiring what somebody extracted from disappointment gets old when the disappointment has its own hospitality suite.

Shanghai was a particularly nasty joke

Hamilton wins the Sprint. Then both Ferraris are disqualified from the Grand Prix, for different technical infringements. [1] Even the relief came with an expiry date printed on the bottom.

That is the emotional whiplash I hate: being given just enough to imagine the whole thing working, then finding another reason the weekend cannot simply be good. The Hamilton arrival was supposed to make the ambition feel enormous. By the end of that season, the gap between the occasion and the racing was enormous instead.

I love the drivers. That makes watching the opportunity drain away worse, not easier.

The other garage remembered the assignment

Ferrari took both WEC titles, with Pier Guidi, Calado and Giovinazzi winning the drivers’ championship in the 51. [2] Finally, something to celebrate without constructing a legal defense for the celebration.

That crew gives me the kind of attachment I want: a car number that means people, stints and an appetite for beating everyone else. Toyota, Porsche, the rest of them—I want them looking at a red car ahead and running out of time to do anything about it.

There is no obligation to turn that into a fair-minded appreciation of the field. The opposition supplies the resistance. Ferrari is where my hope goes.

Which is why the F1 team does not get to hide behind the affection. The badge already has it. The race team still owes us the racing.