Ferrari’s second and final power unit upgrade of the season has landed without moving the needle. The Ferrari ADUO 2 upgrade arrived at Monza, the most power-sensitive circuit on the calendar, and left the Scuderia exactly where it started: behind Mercedes on straight-line speed, and behind Mercedes in the constructors’ championship.
What the Ferrari ADUO 2 upgrade actually is
The Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities mechanism was written into the 2026 regulations to stop the new hybrid formula from freezing a single manufacturer’s advantage in place for years. The assessment is based on internal combustion engine output, and Red Bull Ford was found to have the strongest ICE on the grid. Mercedes, whose power unit has been the class of the field this year, was granted a single upgrade for 2026 and another for 2027. Ferrari, Audi and Honda were each entitled to two.
Ferrari has now spent both of its 2026 allocations, in Austria and at Monza. Mercedes, remarkably, has yet to use its one — the Brackley squad is expected to introduce it in October, a delay we covered when Kimi Antonelli took a grid penalty at Monza without it. If the gap has not closed with Ferrari’s two updates spent and Mercedes’ still in the box, the maths for the rest of the season is uncomfortable reading at Maranello.
Vasseur: “missing pure power”
Fred Vasseur had spent the build-up insisting the ADUO 2 upgrade would be no game changer, and he was not inclined to soften that after a bruising home weekend. “At least I was right on something,” the Ferrari team principal quipped, speaking to Motorsport.com.
Asked whether energy deployment was masking part of the deficit, Vasseur pointed instead at the engine itself. “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 said. “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.”
The numbers support him. Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton qualified fourth and fifth at Monza, and the Ferrari power unit was measured 5.6km/h down on top speed in qualifying. The race went worse still: Leclerc was eliminated in a first-lap clash with his own team-mate, an incident that has dominated the fallout and which Vasseur has so far refused to legislate away with team orders.
Haas got one too — and Bearman wasn’t sold
The clearest independent verdict came from the customer garage. Ferrari supplied one ADUO 2 powertrain to Haas for the Italian Grand Prix, fitted to Oliver Bearman’s car, and the 21-year-old rated it well below the aerodynamic package his own team brought to the same race.
“It’s a much smaller step than what the [aero] upgrade was, let’s say,” Bearman said, as reported by Motorsport.com. “Of course, there’s a bit more in this track, but in terms of a season average, it wouldn’t have been enough to get us out of the fight for Q1, to be honest, if you put that engine on us in Zandvoort. I don’t think it was a game changer.”
Bearman qualified 12th, his best Saturday since March, briefly ran eighth and finished 15th — a seventh consecutive scoreless round for Haas. He credited the chassis work rather than the engine, calling the aero step worth “more than twice or three times the amount of power we got”.
For Ferrari, the implication is that the deficit is structural rather than something a mid-season update can paper over. With the ADUO cupboard bare until 2027 and the next round in Madrid, the Scuderia’s remaining gains this year will have to come from the chassis — and from keeping both cars out of each other’s way. For the full picture of how the new formula reshaped the grid, see our guide to the 2026 F1 regulations.
