Ferrari has given team principal Fred Vasseur a big vote of confidence, just as the second part of its major Formula 1 upgrade package looks to have helped the team secure its status as McLaren's nearest challenger in 2025.
With Mercedes' recent decline and Red Bull's current over-reliance on Max Verstappen, Ferrari is now 28 points clear in second in the championship thanks to Charles Leclerc's fifth grand prix podium of the year in the Belgian Grand Prix.

It's still 268 points short of leader McLaren, with fewer than half of its points, but there are signs Ferrari's once-stuttering development is heading back in the right direction.
Ferrari introduced new suspension at Spa, with revised geometry understood to also feature a modified central damper, which is meant to stop the car's potential being so limited by set-up and ride height compromises.
These changes should allow Ferrari better platform control and to run at the lower ride heights originally envisaged when it first designed the car, but which had to be revised after the plank wear disqualification for Lewis Hamilton in China.
Ferrari has often been compromised since then, with a wariness of repeating that problem in the races since, hence not hitting the heights of Hamilton's sprint pole and win in Shanghai.
The new suspension, together with a floor upgrade that Ferrari got onto the car for the Austrian GP earlier in the summer, is meant to finally allow Ferrari to turn the page on that troublesome setback.
That would ideally set Ferrari up for a much stronger second half of the season, and maybe even let Leclerc and Hamilton fight for victories.
Did the upgrade work?

Leclerc was quietly content with the upgrade. He went into qualifying at Spa expecting to be "fourth, but with a significant gap in front", so to be ahead of Verstappen and just over three tenths of a second behind Lando Norris's pole position time on such a long lap was encouraging.
However, Leclerc was at pains not to get carried away.
"A little bit," Leclerc said when asked if the car felt different with the upgrades. "But then I think as always, especially for our team, everything is hyped up a lot.
"Yes, it's an upgrade and it's a step in the right direction, but we are still speaking about very fine differences over a whole lap. So, it feels a little bit different, and it's going in the right direction.
"Unfortunately for us, McLaren has also brought a few things this weekend and seem to have done a small step in the right direction as well. So, it's very difficult to close the gap."
This upgrade is speculated to be worth no more than a tenth of a second over a single qualifying lap, but it's feasible this also opens up a window which allows a better range of set-ups, particularly with regards to the ultra-sensitive ride height on these ground effect F1 cars, which the team can then fine-tune to find more laptime.

The scope for this was always likely to be limited at Spa, given this was a sprint weekend featuring only a single practice session. So there is hope that it can be exploited more across a traditional grand prix weekend in Hungary.
"It's never easy to introduce something on a sprint weekend, but we didn't want to postpone to Budapest," Vasseur explained.
"It's true that with the format of the weekend, the fact that you don't long stint on Friday, or you're doing a long stint of four laps, it's not easy to have references and so.
"But at the end, I think it was the right call, because it's also the best preparation for us for [Budapest].
"I mean, we try to put everything together a bit earlier into the weekend to be a bit more performant next week."
Vasseur added he's "quite confident that all the tasks that we collected this weekend will pay off" in Budapest.
There also will only be small upgrades and circuit-specific tweaks for Ferrari for the rest of the year, so this is very much the version of the SF-25 it will have for the rest of the year.
One positive for Leclerc was that he felt confident in the car and able to push in something closer to his usual dynamic style in qualifying.
At Silverstone, he said he was "not doing the job" in qualifying this year in general, but he said at Spa that he felt this new version of the Ferrari was allowing him to be more consistent.
And it's that previous lack of consistency - the difficulty he was having in dancing the car right on the edge - that meant his qualifying performances prior to Spa had lacked the great spark he’s usually associated with producing.
Hamilton feedback compromised

Ferrari conducted a filming day at Mugello more than a week before the Belgian GP, with both Hamilton and Leclerc driving, to get an early feel for those rear suspension modifications the team had been working on for several months.
But two factors limited how much information Ferrari generated from the race weekend itself: the weather, and the fact that its cars had such contrasting races.
While Leclerc was surprised to exceed his own expectations, Hamilton's weekend was undermined by shock qualifying exits that he labelled "unacceptable".
As Hamilton put it: "All the testing - the filming day we did, and all the preparation, and then we come here and we don't make it through Q1. It's unacceptable."
Ferrari's drivers are among the most prone to emotional reactions, especially when things go badly. And Hamilton's feedback around the upgrade after qualifying was a little concerning.
Asked if the car felt better, he replied: "No, not really." Hamilton said the main limitation was still the "rear end" and also dismissed a question about whether there was a change of feeling on the rear axle, with a straight "no".
Starting from the pitlane with a new engine and a bigger rear wing for the wet conditions, Hamilton made decent progress in the first part of the grand prix.
But in the dry phase of the race Hamilton's progress stalled, and the fact he was stuck behind Alex Albon's Williams and running more downforce compromised his feedback about how the upgraded Ferrari performed - because his circumstances were totally different to Leclerc's.
And there was actually another Leclerc caveat too: that the improved grip he felt at Spa seemed to be there for everyone, due to rapid circuit evolution as the track was partly resurfaced last year.
Apart from Ferrari just being Ferrari, and endlessly trying to play things down, this fits into why Ferrari wants to keep a lid on the upgrade hype.
There's not only more to do to optimise this package, but it's too small a sample set to judge the benefits - and there is therefore a long way to go before Ferrari can hope to achieve its objective of winning races.
'Crunch time' for Hamilton?

Hamilton felt the tricky Spa weekend would be easy to put behind him as he actually feels confident about his and Ferrari’s recent progress.
Before Spa, Hamilton had outqualified Leclerc in three of the previous four races across Spain, Canada, Austria and Britain. In that time, Hamilton had been 0.045s faster than Leclerc on average in Q3.

Admittedly, the races were a bit trickier - Hamilton was beaten by Leclerc in Spain and Canada despite starting ahead in both, then was denied his desire to switch to an alternative one-stop strategy while trailing Leclerc in Austria.
At Silverstone though, where Hamilton always excels, he was comfortably the stronger Ferrari driver - especially in the wet phase of the grand prix.
If Ferrari can now hit its peaks more consistently, Hamilton will need to show he can rise with that. Because Leclerc has shown time and again he's capable of getting the absolute maximum out of a fast Ferrari if he's not held back by its limitations.
Hamilton's often been capable of doing an equal or occasionally better job with a compromised car. And he would point to the moments he's been able to excel himself: the China sprint, for example, or his strong form at Silverstone.
But his obvious peaks are rarer than Leclerc's: that's why Hamilton has no grand prix podiums to Leclerc's five so far in 2025.
Not that it's bad company, but if Hamilton can change that this weekend, he'll avoid tying with Gilles Villeneuve in second place for the most starts for Ferrari before a first grand prix podium.