Were Ferrari at fault or unlucky with disqualifications?

McLaren’s victory at the start of the season earned Oscar Piastri pole position and the victory in the Chinese Grand Prix.

Lando Norris placed second, completing the top three with George Russell’s Mercedes.

Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton won the sprint race on Saturday but he and team-mate Charles Leclerc were both disqualified from the main grand prix.

How long do you anticipate Red Bull will take to get Liam Lawson up to speed before switching? – Jon

Their patience appears to have run out, in some ways. This week, Red Bull will be discussing Lawson’s future, and it’s possible that he won’t compete in the upcoming Japanese Grand Prix.

If they go through with it, it will be regarded as a quite remarkable decision, which raises serious questions about the management at Red Bull Racing.

Let’s go back and explain why.

Sergio Perez was signed to a two-year contract extension with the Red Bull team in May of last year, ending his 2026 contract there.

This was despite the fact that the Mexican was struggling as Max Verstappen’s team-mate, and that the 2024 season looked to be going the same way as the year before – a bright start from Perez, and then an alarming slump in form.

Carlos Sainz, who had left Ferrari to sign Lewis Hamilton, might have been a free agent. However, he remembered the tensions between the Sainz and Verstappen camps at Toro Rosso in 2015 and made up his mind to return.

Re-signing Perez, Horner’s theory went, would give him the confidence to recover his form.

The strategy was utterly unsuccessful. Despite Verstappen winning a fourth world title by 63 points, Perez’s performances fell off a cliff, and the team fell to third place in the constructors’ championship.

Verstappen only won twice in the final 14 races of the year because the car lost competitiveness and became difficult to drive. So do Perez’s difficulties.

However, Helmut Marko, Horner, and Helmut Marko, the team’s motorsport adviser, decided Perez had had his day and needed to change.

They paid him off – to the tune of many millions of dollars – and signed Lawson.

Because they thought he had a mental toughness lacking the Japanese, they chose the New Zealander over Yuki Tsunoda, their much more experienced team-mate at the junior Racing Bulls team.

The season has started badly for Lawson. He qualified 18th at the season-opener in Melbourne, where he crashed out of the race, and last in both the sprint and grand prix in China, failing to make much progress in either event.

Verstappen, however, struggles at least partially, too. He does not conceal his belief that the car is the top four teams, as he did in China, where he made a strong suggestion that it might not be as fast as the Racing Bull.

The Red Bull is nervous on corner entry, has mid-corner understeer and is snappy on exits. And it doesn’t seem to the team to be able to fix it.

Verstappen enjoys a sharp front end, but he doesn’t want the car to act in this way. But he can cope, and get a lap time out of it. Lawson is unable to, at least not at this point.

Lawson spoke in Chinese as though he already recognized the writing on the wall.

“It’s just (got) a very small window”, he said. You know, driving is difficult, but it’s “hard” to get it in that window. With the passage of time, I’d like to say that I simply don’t have the time to do that. It’s something I need to get on top of”.

The management will need to do some serious explaining if Red Bull decides to drop him after two races.

They will be questioned if signing him in December was the wise choice. Why is that the case now? If Tsunoda is the driver replacing him, the question becomes even starker.

That’s probably too early if they instead choose Frenchman Isack Hadjar, who impressed as Tsunoda’s rookie team-mate in the first two grands prix.

Why blame the driver, if the car appears to be the first-order culprit, as it should be?

Ferrari was responsible for the double disqualification, but was it simply unlucky and out of their control? – Ozan

Formula 1 is a frontier-living organism. Teams must push their cars as far as they can within the technical regulations as they can to win because that is what everyone is doing.

The line between success and failure is so fine. And two of the main performance differences are ride height and weight.

In Formula One, one kilogram of extra weight costs about 0.0335 per lap. Multiply that by the 56 laps of the Chinese Grand Prix, for example, and it’s two seconds of race time. Not much, but it could determine whether you win or not, or whether you are better or worse.

That serves only as an example of why cars are edged. And when you run to the edge, mistakes can happen.

On Sunday, Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari was found to be 1 kg underweight.

Ferrari attributed this to the switch to a one-stop strategy, which meant the car ran the race with less tyre rubber than the anticipated two-stop, and that marked the difference between exceeding the maximum weight limit and falling below it.

Of course, other teams also switched to a one-stop, without ending up underweight. Mercedes and George Russell faced the same fate last year in Belgium after being disqualified for victory.

Lewis Hamilton’s skid blocks were too worn. Again, it’s the sort of thing that can happen – indeed, it happened to Hamilton when he was at Mercedes in the 2023 US Grand Prix, and Leclerc in the same race.

Again, it’s about limiting the options. As long as teams can maintain aerodynamic stability, the lower these current cars can typically be driven, creating the most downforce.

But run them too low, and they risk wearing the floor excessively – and that’s what happened.

Aside from the McLaren, who has impressed you the most at this very early stage? – SJM

The season has already started off very well for Racing Bulls. Tsunoda qualified fifth in Australia, and his team-mate Hadjar was seventh on the grid and Tsunoda ninth in China.

Although the cars have fared a little wrong, Verstappen even suggested that it was superior to the Red Bull in China.

Racing Bulls use a good deal of Red Bull components, but since Red Bull have started to struggle, it may not be as much as it once did in theory when rival rivals worried about the close relationship between the two teams.

In the cockpit, Hadjar, notwithstanding his crash on the formation lap in Australia, has made a strong first impression.

How did Lewis Hamilton’s sprint and qualifying times differ so much? Or how did the other drivers close the gap in such a short space of time? – Ash

There are several reasons for this. Ferrari hit the ground running in China and landed on a decent set-up for sprint qualifying in the single practice session before it.

Hamilton also gave a fantastic performance on a track where he has always done well to take pole.

However, other teams involved had some underachievement.

The McLaren was the fastest car in China and Oscar Piastri was more comfortable in it than Lando Norris. In sprint qualifying, both teams finished third and sixth on the grid.

At the first corner, Hamilton converted pole to lead, and he then made the most of the opening opportunity.

He drove superbly, but he was protected from Piastri for much of the race by Verstappen, who the Australian did not pass until four laps from the end, by which time Hamilton had built a lead too big to overhaul.

After the sprint, the teams can switch up their setups, and it appears that a more natural order has already been established by the time of the grand prix qualifying.

According to Hamilton, “We had a pretty decent car in the sprint, and then we made some changes to try to move forward and improve the car, but it ultimately made it worse going into qualifying and then it was even worse in the race.”

Among those changes seems to have been lifting the car slightly, which Hamilton more or less confirmed after the race: “I don’t know who said we lifted the car, but we made some other changes, mostly, as well as that, but not massively, just small amounts”.

Even though Leclerc had a damaged front wing, he was faster than Hamilton in the grand prix. And Hamilton’s car still wore the skid blocks too much despite the modifications. Hence his disqualification.

Is it possible that all information is passed by radio or telemetry as the drivers enter the pit wall? – Phil

The only useful information about the drivers is that pit boards provide, primarily laps left, with other important information. The front and back drivers’ gaps are frequently included as well.

They’re also there as a back-up in case the radio fails.