Ferrari had their hopes for a Silverstone podium dashed during the 2025 British Grand Prix as a rare GPS failure on the car of Lewis Hamilton which left the team making strategy calls in the dark.
The unexpected glitch prevented the pit wall from monitoring their driver’s live position on track, a situation Ferrari team boss Fred Vasseur described as being “completely blind.” For a squad used to operating with precision, it became a high-stakes guessing game that played a major role in a tough afternoon.
Hamilton began the race aiming to extend his run of podiums at his home circuit but instead found himself grappling with changing weather, a tricky SF-25, and a team that could not see where he was on the circuit.
The crucial moment came when Ferrari had to decide when to switch from intermediate to slick tyres. Without GPS, Ferrari had their judgment compromised, leading to a pit stop on Lap 41 that saw Hamilton go wide at Turns 3 and 4 and lose vital seconds. That allowed Nico Hulkenberg to pit a lap later and stay ahead, ultimately denying Hamilton a place on the rostrum.
“You can say now that it was probably one lap too early, because he went straight in Turn 3/4 and he lost four or five seconds in these two corners,” Vasseur told the media, including Total-Motorsport.com, after the race.
“But Fernando Alonso pitted before and he was already faster in some corners than all the guys on intermediates. It’s the kind of situation that if you wait, the others do it before you and it’s always too late, and I think it’s quite easy to say after the race ‘first pitstop would have been better one lap before, second pit stop one lap later’.”
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Ferrari’s Struggle to Adapt Without GPS
The loss of GPS did more than disrupt the strategy Ferrari planned for Hamilton. For a modern F1 team, every pit decision, pace comparison, and sector time relies on accurate car tracking.
“On top of that we lost the GPS of Lewis the whole race and that meant we were completely blind and we didn’t know where the car was. It was a difficult one,” Vasseur explained.
Complicating matters was the car setup Ferrari had chosen for the wet weekend. Both Hamilton and Charles Leclerc found the SF-25 unpredictable, with Hamilton describing it as “very snappy” after running wide at Copse.
Leclerc’s day was derailed from the start after a failed gamble to fit slicks before the green flag, which saw him struggle to make progress and eventually finish 14th. Ferrari opted for a high-downforce configuration in the hope of excelling in wet conditions, but it created its own challenges.
“We were a step down compared to McLaren. We had much more downforce than Max [Verstappen] but we were also much faster than Max today,” said Vasseur. “I’m not sure that the pure pace is the main issue today. What is true on Charles at least is that the race was done Lap 1 with the call to pit for slicks.”
The team also battled the persistent problem of overtaking in “dirty air.” Both drivers wore through their tyres trying to move up the order, often spending ten laps or more behind slower cars before making a pass.
“The main issue we had today was that we struggled a lot when we are in the dirty air to overtake and we spent more [tyre] life to overtake, sometimes 10 laps, then we were much faster,” Vasseur added.
As the chequered flag fell, only Lando Norris and Nico Hulkenberg seemed free of regret, having made the right calls in the trickiest conditions. For Ferrari, it was a weekend of missed opportunities, complicated further by an issue as basic—but devastating—as losing GPS tracking.
“We have to focus on the qualifying and the championship,” Vasseur concluded, already turning attention to upcoming races. For Ferrari and Hamilton, Silverstone 2025 will be remembered as the race where the team had to fly blind, learning the hard way just how much modern F1 depends on real-time data.
