There’s a version of Ferrari’s recent history where every failure gets attributed to the car - the tyre deg, the balance issues, the power unit reliability. That version is convenient. It lets the pit wall off the hook.
The pattern is too consistent to keep blaming hardware. Ferrari has had race-winning machinery in multiple seasons this decade and converted a fraction of what it should have. The calls that cost them - holding a driver out too long, pitting when the safety car window had already closed, splitting strategies that made sense on paper and fell apart the moment track position shifted - these are not one-off errors. They are a recurring signature.
What makes it stranger is that Ferrari’s technical operation is genuinely strong. The Maranello factory has produced cars capable of leading races, sometimes capable of dominating them. The gap between what the car can do and what the result actually is tends to open up precisely at the moments when the pit wall has to make a fast decision under pressure.
Other teams have fixed this. Mercedes went through a period of questionable strategy calls around 2022 and restructured how decisions were made and communicated during races. Red Bull under Adrian Newey’s peak years had a strategic ruthlessness that matched the car’s pace. The decisions came quickly and they were usually right because the team had a clear hierarchy of priorities in the moment.
Ferrari’s structure has never quite looked like that. There’s always been a sense - from the outside, from driver radio clips, from post-race debriefs that contradict each other - that the pit wall is processing too many inputs when it should be cutting to one.
The irony is that Leclerc, for all the contract extensions and the loyalty narrative, has spent his peak years absorbing decisions that a driver of his ability should not have had to recover from. He’s done it with minimal public complaint, which probably makes it easier for the organisation to not fix the thing that needs fixing.
Ferrari will close the gap on the constructors’ table eventually. They always do. And the next time a race slips away in a 10-second window during the second stint, the debrief will probably mention tyre temperatures.