There is a particular kind of suffering that only Ferrari fans know. It is not the suffering of irrelevance — Ferrari has never been irrelevant. It is the suffering of perpetual almost. Of watching a car that can clearly win races fail, across a full season, to win a championship. Of watching rivals consolidate while Maranello oscillates. The 2025 season, through the lens of the Belgian Grand Prix weekend at Spa-Francorchamps, is beginning to feel like a rerun of every Ferrari season since 2008.

The British Grand Prix win was real. Lewis Hamilton crossing the line at Silverstone in red was not a fluke — the SF-25 had the pace, Hamilton drove it cleanly, and Ferrari executed a strategy without self-destructing. For about 72 hours, the paddock genuinely entertained the idea that something had shifted at Maranello. Then the data started coming in from Spa simulations, and the conversations got quieter.

The core tension inside Ferrari's 2025 campaign is one the team has been unable to resolve for going on seventeen years: the gap between single-lap performance and championship consistency. Ferrari regularly produces cars that are the fastest thing on track for three or four weekends in a row. The problem is that Formula 1 championships are not decided on any single Sunday — they are decided across 24 of them, in the wet and the dry, in the heat and the cold, on tracks that reward downforce and tracks that punish it. Ferrari's development trajectory has historically been front-loaded: fast early, then stalled or overtaken as rivals find more downforce in the second half of the season.

Mercedes, by contrast, has spent this season looking less like a team chasing pole positions and more like one methodically closing a gap. Toto Wolff has been characteristically direct in internal messaging that leaked into paddock conversation: pace without results is a vanity metric. That framing is not accidental. It is a shot across the bow at exactly the kind of Saturday headline-grabbing that Ferrari has historically prioritized, and it signals that the Silver Arrows — even in a transitional year — are building toward something more disciplined than Ferrari's feast-or-famine rhythm.

Andrea Kimi Antonelli, meanwhile, arrives at Spa as a points leader who has done something genuinely difficult: he has made reliability and strategic compliance look boring. For a 19-year-old in his first full season, that is not boring at all. It is the most important thing in Formula 1. Every point Antonelli banks in Belgium while Ferrari is figuring itself out is a point that may well decide where the Constructors' trophy sits in December.

Hamilton's personal subplot at Spa adds another layer. He arrives needing a specific result to equal Michael Schumacher's record for Belgian Grand Prix victories — a record that carries weight precisely because Schumacher built it across eras and machinery that had no business winning as often as he made them win. Hamilton has been publicly cool on championship talk, and that restraint reads as either genuine recalibration or carefully managed expectation-setting. What is not in dispute is that Spa suits his driving style: high-speed commitment through Eau Rouge, late-braking into Bus Stop, the kind of track where accumulated lap knowledge compounds into advantage.

The structural question hanging over Ferrari, though, is not whether Hamilton can win in Belgium. It is whether winning in Belgium means anything if the team then arrives at Monza with a car that has gained 0.3 seconds on the straight but lost 0.4 in sector two. Ferrari's engineering meetings in Maranello are not public, but the pattern of their development updates over the past four seasons is: they fix the obvious things quickly, and then the less obvious things stay broken for a long time.

A deadline is also approaching on the calendar itself. Race promoters in the Middle East are navigating rescheduling pressures tied to geopolitical and logistical factors that the FIA has acknowledged without fully detailing publicly. How that shakes out will affect the back end of the season — and back-end calendar compression historically punishes teams that have not locked in their aero development cycle by September. Ferrari, historically, is not those teams.

The three lions metaphor is apt not because England and Ferrari share a trophy cabinet — they do not — but because both carry a weight of expectation that has calcified into something almost structural. Everyone believes, or wants to believe, that the talent and the resources are there. The evidence keeps suggesting that belief and execution are not the same thing. Spa this weekend will not settle the question. But it will sharpen it.