Every team sport has its clash of the titans; Springboks vs All Blacks in rugby, England against Australia for The Ashes, the eternal footballing rivalry of Real Madrid and Barcelona. In Formula 1, McLaren and Ferrari have waged war for half a century, on and off, producing some of the most dramatic, antagonistic and controversial battles in grand prix history. In 2025, a thrilling new chapter should be added.

Last year was the 14th time the duo ended the season as the top two points scorers in the constructors’ championship, with honours split at 7-7. Today’s Ferrari is very different to the one that dominated in the Jean Todt/Michael Schumacher era, and is worlds apart from the team Enzo Ferrari directed from afar. McLaren, too, is a profoundly different beast, now in its fourth guise with the days of Bruce McLaren, Teddy Mayer and Ron Dennis – the architects of its past successes – long gone.

Yet even for a modern F1 team of 1000-plus souls, the boss plays a critical role in defining a team. In evaluating how the two teams stand ahead of their latest heavyweight clash, we must start with the leaders.

Team Leadership 

Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur and his opposite number at McLaren, Andrea Stella, assumed their current positions just over two years ago. Vasseur was a Maranello newcomer, while Stella was long-established as an indispensable engineering leader for McLaren since joining from Ferrari in 2015 before taking the helm. Each has had a profound impact.

Vasseur is avuncular, disarms dangerous questions with a joke and a chuckle, summing up his approach as “I stay away from the polemics”. Ruthlessly competitive behind the scenes, like all true masters of the art playing the political game in the shadows while preventing such shenanigans disrupting his team. He’s cracked the Maranello code by imposing a focus on process and giving clear direction, treating the imposters of triumph and disaster just the same. As Ross Brawn once said, “as you start to walk around Ferrari, you wonder why they don’t win every single world championship”. Failing to do these ostensibly straightforward things is the common thread in its long spells of underachievement. Allowing your people to work without fear of scapegoating is the essential precondition for Ferrari success.

“The mindset is a big part of why we are much stronger now,” says Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc. “In Formula 1, and especially around Ferrari, there are always rumours, always things that are being said. All the outside noise used to affect us and the way we worked. Since Fred got in the team, there’s been a big step forward. That helps the whole team to work better, in a more disciplined way, without being affected by the outside perception, which is very important.”

Vasseur calls Ferrari a “no-end project”, meaning there’s constant improvement. He’s recruited and reorganised technically – most recently with former Mercedes man Loic Serra joining and taking over the chassis technical director role from Aston Martin-bound Enrico Cardile. The arrival of ex-F1 driver Jérôme d’Ambrosio as deputy team principal is the latest evolution in the process.

Stella was shaped by Ferrari, having worked for the team from 2000-14. Thoughtful, reflective and thorough, his time in red, during which he was Michael Schumacher’s performance engineer, then race engineer for Kimi Räikkönen and Fernando Alonso, shaped the philosophy of this thoughtful character.

“I’ve always been interested in understanding what makes organisations successful,” says Stella. “And also what makes individuals successful; why Michael Schumacher was so successful in a team that he joined when the car was nowhere near the best car. He created the conditions to produce the best car and then sustained this. Why could he do that? What attributes did he have, and why did Ferrari create these conditions to dominate?”

Stella has answers to these questions. He’s injected a sense of urgency into McLaren as, despite his calm character, he recognises the risk of a team expecting to thrive tomorrow, but tomorrow never coming. This doesn’t manifest itself as pressure to succeed, with the resulting fear of failure, but eliminates the belief there always needs to be some new piece of equipment or improvement in order to be competitive. Combined with a determination to extract the maximum from every member of the team – for example switching to a technical director triumvirate to unleash the creativity of the department heads – this has been key to McLaren’s re-emergence as a frontunner. Without Stella, and CEO Zak Brown fully empowering him, it might still be treading water.

Driver Choices

Lewis Hamilton has made a seismic impact in a short space of time for Ferrari off-track, exemplified by the fan frenzy surrounding his first test in a 2023 car at Fiorano in January. Whether or not he can live up to the expectation out on the circuit is the essential question in weighing up the Ferrari and McLaren driver line-ups.

The arrival of statistically F1’s greatest-ever should give Ferrari the edge. Yet doubts surround 40-year-old Hamilton after a season in which he struggled in qualifying in a capricious Mercedes. Doubtless, he will benefit from the new challenge but the question is whether a change of team will allow Hamilton to get back to his best. His race drives remained largely dependable, as demonstrated by an excellent run from 10th to second in Las Vegas late last year, but qualifying was a weakness in 2024.

He admitted last year he “hates” the driving style demanded by his Mercedes, but what will decide whether or not he thrives at Ferrari will be whether or not his struggles with the characteristics of the current brand of heavy, unresponsive cars at odds with his late-braking, aggressive rotation style will be mitigated by a less troubled car. Chances are, it will be better but even then Leclerc poses a threat.

“The mindset is a big part of why we are much stronger now”

Coming off the back of his best F1 campaign, Leclerc is established as Ferrari’s spearhead. Unlike Hamilton, he adapted to the current generation of cars well, saying, “I quite like them in terms of driving style.” While his default style is a little different to Hamilton’s, overlapping the throttle under braking to induce rotation then precisely managing the oversteer he favours through the rest of the corner with incredible sensitivity, both require similar car traits. They can therefore thrive with the same car.

At McLaren, Lando Norris has proven himself to be one of the quickest in F1, combining great feel with a comprehensive and adaptable toolkit allowing him to produce stellar qualifying laps and brilliantly managed race stints. He must still improve in wheel-to-wheel combat, but should emerge from last year’s title-tilt-that-never-was as a more hardened competitor.

Norris is McLaren’s Leclerc: established, proven, formidable, but Oscar Piastri fills the Hamilton role. Since making his F1 debut last year, Piastri has made a big impact and shown himself to be hard as nails on track, exemplified by his opportunistic overtake on Leclerc for the lead in Baku. The key question is whether he can match his team-mate’s qualifying pace.

“I’ve made life tougher for myself in qualifying than I would have liked,” admits Piastri. “It’s now a case of getting everything together rather than trying to fill in holes.”

He’s certainly quick, but if he can’t consistently get close to Norris he will too often start on the back foot in races. But in only his third season and with his knowledge base broadening, there’s every chance he will be able to refine his game and take the step forward that he needs. If he can, he will trouble Norris and potentially give McLaren the edge over Ferrari.

Car Development

McLaren is the gold standard for F1 car development under the current regulations with remarkable gains over the past two years, but it must start on the front foot this year.

In early 2022, McLaren was dogged by a brake-cooling problem that took six races to fix before emerging as a podium regular. In 2024, it also started slowly – although Stella compellingly argues this was a consequence of the natural development rate because it had to learn from the big step made with a major upgrade in September 2023 at Singapore, meaning it inevitably took time to push through the May package that transformed it into a race-winning force. After Miami last year, it had the strongest car across the balance of the year.

McLaren understood the demands of today’s F1 cars, where prodigious downforce can be produced if the car runs low enough, and shifted development approach quicker than any of its rivals. Whereas the old-generation of cars would get quicker as you piled on the downforce, today is a more refined test given the ever-present threat of porpoising and the other negatives of super-stiff ride. McLaren quickly adapted its aerodynamic development processes, creating a patient and robust loop of research including the wind tunnel, CFD, supporting simulator tools and track data to ensure sure-footedness in the steps it made. At times, that meant it held back on introducing an upgrade, but they were only signed off when things worked. This is crucial given the counterintuitive risk of increased downforce coming hand in hand with handling troubles that can sap laptime.

Ferrari’s 2024 was a curate’s egg developmentally. It started as the second-best car and ended strongly, but the introduction of a floor upgrade for June’s Spanish Grand Prix cost it the constructors’ championship. It ran into costly porpoising problems, requiring mitigating steps before a definitive solution was introduced at Monza in September that turned the car back into a winner. It was the six-race spell that started in Spain, combined with the disastrous Canadian weekend that preceded it, that turned a potentially great season into merely a good one. This could be a bad omen, suggesting Ferrari is a step behind McLaren in terms of understanding, but the fact it recognised the problem, didn’t panic and took a patient approach to fixing it is encouraging. The old Ferrari would have tripped up had this happened.

Both also made gains with flexible wings, McLaren first then Ferrari. With the FIA’s changes to permitted flexibility kicking in after the first eight races this year, it could prove a key battleground between the pair.

Trackside Execution 

The caricature of Ferrari is that it’s a chaotic team prone to strategic mishaps and self-inflicted wounds. That reputation is outdated. Last year, its execution on race weekends was generally on point. This reflects Vasseur’s culture change, whose sense of proportion has tamed the more volatile excesses.

“We made a good step forward compared to 2023,” says Vasseur of ’24. “Reliability was better, strategy was good, pitstops went well, the performance was there, we scored 60% more points than one year ago, five wins against one. The only thing is we finished the season 14 points behind McLaren.”

Yet there were missed opportunities. Both Singapore and Azerbaijan were winnable, so Ferrari still isn’t sufficiently clinical. However, McLaren arguably has more gains to make in this area, hence Norris’s recent reference to the desire to “win these races easily, and not have them as difficult as they were last year”.

“We made a good step forward. The performance was there”

There were times when strategy let it down. McLaren was usually on the money in steady-state races, but occasionally it was flat-footed – notably, failing to give Norris a ‘pit if safety car is deployed’ message in Canada, and eschewing the advantage of being the only leading car with a set of the choice medium tyres at the final pitstop at Silverstone. Lessons will have been learned from this and McLaren must be sharper.

While McLaren has to be considered favourite going into 2025, it’s a coin toss between it and Ferrari. There’s also the confounding factor of Red Bull, and the looming threat of underachieving Mercedes. But regardless of how the interlopers might play into it, history means Ferrari vs McLaren can’t fail to be the headliner.