Ferrari’s Monza fumble: is the Scuderia shooting itself in the foot?

Ferrari’s home race never truly began

Ferrari’s Italian Grand Prix was supposed to be a defining home performance. Instead, it became a weekend in which the team’s hopes unravelled almost as quickly as they had appeared.

That is the uncomfortable conclusion from Monza: Ferrari did not merely miss an opportunity. It made the opportunity harder to recover.

The first-lap clash was a Ferrari failure, not just a driver error

Both drivers have to accept some responsibility for what happened at the first chicane. Hamilton was too aggressive in his attempt to dive down the inside, while Leclerc did not leave sufficient room. The exact split of blame matters less than the collective result: Ferrari’s two cars were compromised by their own fight.

Leclerc’s assessment that “we went too far” was the clearest summary of the episode. At a home race, with the tifosi watching and the wider championship picture in mind, the team needed its drivers to understand when to compete and when to preserve Ferrari’s overall result. That balance was missing.

The issue also extends beyond the cockpit. Ferrari’s management of the situation has to be included in the analysis. Team-mate battles do not become safer simply because both drivers are allowed to race freely. They require judgment, especially when the two cars are operating in close quarters at the first corner and the potential cost of contact is immediate.

Ferrari’s drivers appeared to be treating every opportunity as if victory over the other car was the only objective. That may produce compelling television, but it is not an effective way to maximise a team’s points. Nor does it suggest a structure capable of supporting a title challenge when the car is already short of the pace needed to dominate a weekend.

The result was especially damaging because the Ferrari challenge did not have much margin for error. Once the first-lap fight had gone wrong, the team was already relying on circumstances to keep its podium hopes alive. Those circumstances did not arrive.

Ferrari lacked the pace to recover

It would be too easy to treat the clash as the sole explanation for Ferrari’s disappointing Monza. The underlying performance was not strong enough either.

I'll be blunt here: Ferrari did not have the car to get on the podium. That means the team must resist the temptation to frame the weekend only as a missed tactical opportunity. Even without the first-corner incident, Ferrari would still have faced a difficult task against the leading cars.

Leclerc’s subsequent crash on the exit of the Parabolica removed another possible route back into contention. Together, the intra-team skirmish and the crash eliminated any realistic chance of either Ferrari challenging for the podium. But the larger message remained unchanged: the car itself needed more performance.

Ferrari therefore has to take a measure of humility from Monza. The team’s title hopes may not have been entirely extinguished by this one race, but they were never supported by the level of car performance required to turn possibility into probability. The season is beginning to look like another campaign defined by the familiar pattern of “should’ve, could’ve, would’ve” — possibilities that ultimately count for nothing when the car is not good enough.

That is the distinction between a disappointing result and a disappointing weekend. A bad result can be repaired by a strong underlying package. At Monza, Ferrari had neither the clean execution nor the pace to make that recovery possible.

For a team competing at its home event, that is why the weekend felt so flat. The pressure was greater, but the performance never rose to meet it.

Monza’s final verdict

Ferrari leaves its home race with two conclusions to confront. First, its drivers must take responsibility for racing each other beyond the point of usefulness. Second, the team must accept that its car was not fast enough to challenge for the podium, even before the weekend’s errors compounded the problem.