Technical images from the 2025 Miami Grand Prix explained - including Ferrari’s new paint wrap innovation

The Scuderia’s new blue and red livery also represented the debut of a new paint wrapping technology.

Part of the Ferrari SF-25 is wrapped and part of it painted, but the team’s sponsor HP worked with Ferrari engineers to implement a new latex car wrap that it says is up to 14% lighter and up to 17% thinner than it was in 2024, with better thermal resistance.

Furthermore, HP says the new wrap takes less time to apply and could lead to “even more striking designs in the future”.

A close-up look at Ferrari’s front brake ducts housing shows how meticulously crafted the F1 car’s wheel hub is. This carbon fibre piece includes suspension wishbones that connect the hub to the front of the car, but it is also sculpted to direct airflow towards the floor and sidepods of the car, increasing downforce.

On the inside of the wheel, a brake duct channels hot air away from the front wheel, helping keep the tyres and brakes cool. This is, however, the housing for the front brake ducts; within it sits the calliper, pads and brake disc itself. 

This photograph of the rear of the Ferrari SF-25 shows how narrow the rear of the car is. By tapering the bodywork inwards, air is channelled inwards and away from the rear wheels - reducing the amount of drag created by the rear wheels. 

Furthermore, that air can then be channelled to the suspension wishbones (visible between the tyre and bodywork) to generate a small amount of local downforce. Crucially, that air also hits the rear beamwing and rear wing, where it generates even more downforce and provides grip and stability to the car.

A close-up of the rear of the Red Bull floor shows the connecting rod between the body and the floor. This rod plays a crucial role in stopping the floor from flexing too much, ensuring a more consistent amount of downforce generated by the floor by preventing airflow from stalling. 

This outer edge of the floor not only produces some local downforce but helps seal the underfloor, ensuring a consistent area of low-pressure airflow beneath the car through the Venturi tunnels - an area that produces most of the downforce in this era of F1.

Red Bull brought a floor upgrade to Max Verstappen’s car in Miami in the photographed area, introducing a different arrangement of floor vanes to enhance local downforce.

Chief engineer Paul Monaghan said: “The flow stability is unchanged so we’re not fearing it to be aerodynamically unstable or anything of that nature. It can go on and it’ll give us a few kilos of load and we shall enjoy the benefits.”

Monaghan said that the new upgrade wasn’t immediately going to change Red Bull’s balance problems - in which the car can be unstable during cornering - but it was one of a few “incremental improvements” to the car that will come over the season. 

Other teams did not bring upgrades other than tweaks to rear wings and front wings to the circuit as it was a sprint weekend, with just one practice session available to test the efficacy of parts.

McLaren exhibited its front wing in the pitlane on the Friday of the Miami Grand Prix. The stands are custom built by teams to pack their parts and keep them safe during transit, underlining just how closely engineered everything in F1 is.

The front wing is the first part of the car’s body to meet the airflow, meaning this is a pivotal part of the bodywork. Teams change the angle of incidence of their front wing to match the downforce levels to the track characteristics. F1 wings have three flaps and a mainplane (on which the ECOLAB logo is visible). All three flaps generate downforce while the mainplane of the wing helps channel air under the nose and to the underfloor.

The endplates (where the workday logo is visible) channel vortices of air to the sides of the car. These swirling patterns of air can be created by trailing edges such as the front wing endplates and are important in preventing air from exiting or entering the underfloor, thus sealing it and enhancing the downforce generated by that part of the car.

A close look at Sauber’s car shows the one-off livery it applied to its car but more significantly the huge undercut under its sidepods, which creates an area of low-pressure airflow underneath and generates downforce. 

The floor itself has vanes on it (visible under the Stake logo), a feature on every F1 car. These vanes create vortices, just as the trailing edges of the wings do, to seal the airflow underneath the car and enhance the effect of the Venturi tunnels and diffuser at the rear. 

If the floor was flat all along its edge, air would enter or escape the floor and the car wouldn’t generate as much downforce as it does.