“Disaster” and “chaos” were among the headlines from Italian media in the wake of Ferrari‘s shock double disqualification from the Chinese Grand Prix.

Lewis Hamilton was disqualified after the skid block on the bottom of his car was found to be too thin, for which the team blamed a “miscalculation”.

Charles Leclerc – as well as the Alpine of Pierre Gasly – was excluded after his car weighed in a full kilogram lighter than the minimum weight. The team blamed excess tyre wear having unexpectedly only done one pitstop in the race.

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Ferrari was allowed to replace a broken front wing on Leclerc’s car before it was weighed. Once a mandatory fuel sample was removed, it tipped the scales at 799kg. The strict minimum weight is 800kg.

It was the first Ferrari double disqualification in the 75-year history of Formula 1. Turin sports paper Tuttosport wrote the team had “plunged into an abyss from which it may be difficult to rise again. At least not quickly.”

Speaking to Sky Sports Germany, Ralf Schumacher was far more scathing.

“Incompetence,” he said.

The skid block on the bottom of Hamilton’s car was found to be half a millimetre too thin. The skid blocks must be 10mm thick, but the rules allow for 1mm of wear during a race. Hamilton’s skid block was as narrow as 8.5mm.

While the stewards acknowledged the team made “genuine errors”, the black-and-white nature of the technical rules mean there is zero tolerance and the FIA had no option but to disqualify them both from the race.

Having already completed the 19-lap sprint race on Saturday, which Hamilton won, Schumacher said the Brit’s race engineers should have been able to gauge how much the skid block would wear.

“You can assume that the engineer should know what he’s doing,” the brother of seven-time world champion Michael said.

“The wear on the underbody was already clearly visible there.

“Saturday was so good, (Sunday) they’ve been disqualified. Of course that’s not on.”

Ferrari copped the disqualifications on the chin, and promised to investigate.

“There was no intention to gain any advantage. We will learn from what happened and make sure we don’t make the same mistakes again.

“Clearly it’s not the way we wanted to end our Chinese GP weekend, neither for ourselves, nor for our fans whose support is unwavering.”

Schumacher said the investigation should leave “no stone unturned”.

Ferrari fans will know this is far from the first major error the team has made. In fact, they have a reputation of making baffling strategy calls, poor decision-making under pressure, or just general mistakes when under pressure.

Perhaps it’s something to do with the relentless pressure put on them from Italian media, or just the weight of being arguably one of the best-known sports teams in the world.

In the wake of Ferrari’s Shanghai shipwreck, here are a couple of other Ferrari disasters from recent memory.

Singapore 2008

Felipe Massa was leading the race when he dived into the pits after the safety car was called for that crash for Nelson Piquet Jr. Ferrari that year had a new electronic lollipop system, and it was triggered early, prompting Massa to drive away from his stall. The only problem was the fuel rig was still attached to the side of his car.

Massa drove down the length of the pit lane before Ferrari mechanics were able to chase him down and remove the rig from his car.

Singapore 2017

Still in Singapore, Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Räikkönen were involved in a controversial start line incident in a wet start in 2017. Räikkönen got an electric start and looked to overtake Verstappen and Vettel on the inside.

At the same time, Vettel tried to pinch Verstappen. Both Ferraris spun across Verstappen’s nose, and they were both out of the race.

While the incident itself could be put down as a start line crash with no one person at fault, Ferrari’s handling of the situation drew the ire of fans. A tweet initially put the blame squarely on Verstappen, and team officials continued to double down after the race.

Monaco 2019

Before his victory in the principality in 2024, Charles Leclerc was said to have a ‘Monaco Curse’. Some of it was team inflicted, like in 2019.

Leclerc had been quick in practice, and set a lap time in the first part of qualifying the team thought would be good enough to see him comfortably through to Q2. It was not.

As the clock wound down and Leclerc began to slip down the timesheets, his team elected against sending him back out to set a quicker lap, and he was knocked out.

Starting from 15th, Leclerc had climbed to 12th on lap eight before he clipped the wall and punctured his rear tyre. He destroyed his car’s floor driving back to the pits and eventually retired.

The entire 2022 season

Ferrari without started the 2022 season, the first year of the current aerodynamic regulations, with the fastest car.

But the did everything they could to ensure they didn’t win the championship, and were eventually successful.

In Spain and Azerbaijan, Leclerc was comfortably leading before suffering engine failures.

In Monaco, Leclerc was leading when they reacted far too late to changing weather conditions. He had already been undercut by the Red Bull of Sergio Perez when he was further delayed by a disastrous double-stack in the pit lane behind teammate Carlos Sainz.

In France, Leclerc was leading when he made an uncharacteristic error and crashed out. His desperate “NOOOOOOOO” on team radio is burnt into the brains of the Tifosi.

At Silverstone, Leclerc was again leading when the team opted against pitting him during a late-race safety car. All those behind him did, and he was a sitting duck when the race resumed.

In Hungary, unseasonably cold weather meant the hardest of the three tyre compounds in use that weekend was virtually unusable. But guess what, instead of a two-stop strategy using the mediums and softs, Ferrari tried a one-stop using the mediums and hards.

Leclerc couldn’t get the tyres up to temperature and he plummeted down the order to eventually finish sixth. In the cooldown room, Max Verstappen and the Mercedes duo of Lewis Hamilton and George Russell laughed when a highlights package showed Leclerc on the hards.

And then at Zandvoort, they called Carlos Sainz into the pits and only had three tyres ready. They literally forgot one.