Ferrari’s latest engine upgrade was supposed to narrow the gap to Mercedes, but Fred Vasseur has conceded that the Scuderia’s new-spec power unit remains short of the outright performance needed to go toe-to-toe with its German rival.
The admission comes after a bruising home weekend at Monza, where Ferrari arrived with the second of its permitted Formula 1 ADUO power-unit upgrades hoping to extract more performance from the SF-26.
Instead, the high-speed Italian circuit exposed a weakness that Ferrari could not disguise. Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton could only manage the second row in qualifying, while the Mercedes-powered Alpine of Pierre Gasly and George Russell seized the front row.
Sunday brought little relief. Leclerc’s race ended spectacularly early after a 60G first-lap crash, while Hamilton struggled to convert Ferrari’s home advantage into a meaningful result, eventually finishing sixth.
Ferrari’s power deficit exposed at Monza
For Vasseur, the problem was not primarily how Ferrari was deploying its available energy. The Frenchman made clear that the fundamental issue was more basic: the engine simply does not produce enough outright power.
“I don’t want to give details, but when you have a lack of pure power, then you start to play with deployment to try to compensate in one straight line,” he explained.
“But if you deploy more somewhere, for sure you will deploy less somewhere else and then you are going in the wrong spiral to try to play with this when you are fighting.
“Honestly, it’s not about deployment. I think deployment was okay-ish, that even McLaren, they were playing a little bit Friday and Saturday morning.
“At the end, we are missing pure power.”
That shortfall was particularly painful at Monza, where long straights and heavy braking zones leave little room for an underpowered car to hide. Vasseur believes the Ferrari-Mercedes deficit was magnified dramatically compared with a more conventional circuit such as Zandvoort.
“The reality of this is that if you are missing X in Zandvoort, you are two or three tenths [down]. If you are missing X minus – I’m using letters because you will try to extrapolate – if you are missing a bit less than X in Monza, the delta with the Merc is two times bigger,” he added.
Ferrari’s real target is further down the road
Vasseur is adamant that Ferrari never expected the first two ADUO upgrade opportunities to magically erase its power deficit.
The regulations permit Ferrari, Audi and Honda two engine development opportunities across 2026 and 2027, while Mercedes has one and Red Bull has been frozen after its power unit was judged to have the strongest internal-combustion performance.
But Ferrari’s boss insists that the gains made so far still matter – even if they are incremental.
“On the engine, the process is mega long because the lead time of the parts is long and the cost cap is not easy,” Vasseur explained.
“You have to produce the engine for the season. You are already a bit like this and if you want to start to do the development, you have to produce a new batch of engines, and it’s tricky.
“We were not expecting to recover [with] ADUO 1 or ADUO 2. We are doing small steps, but what you have to keep in mind is that if you make a small step on the engine, even if you make a couple of horsepower, it’s a good step on the grid.
“That means that now we will have a new engine next year. For sure, the target is to catch up, to catch up as soon as possible, but I was not expecting that in two months we will recover the delta with Mercedes.”
For Ferrari, then, Monza was less a verdict on its engine programme than a stark reminder of the mountain still to climb.
The ADUO gains may be arriving, but Mercedes remains the benchmark – and Ferrari’s ultimate reckoning may have to wait until 2027.
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