Just when Ferrari thought things couldn’t get much worse on the engine front, Mercedes has decided to rub it in. Despite already running what the paddock accepts as the strongest power unit on the grid, Mercedes is preparing to introduce an upgrade under Formula 1’s Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities scheme, and the timing could not be crueller for a Ferrari team that is already being blown into the weeds on the straights.
The background here is simple enough. The FIA’s own analysis found Red Bull more than 2% ahead of the rest on the internal combustion engine metric that ADUO is judged on, which triggered the mechanism’s tiered rewards. Red Bull gets nothing. Mercedes gets one upgrade this year and one in 2027. Ferrari, Audi and Honda get two apiece across the same period, which is the subject of the earlier Red Bull joke about owning the best engine on the grid without a single win to show for it. Mercedes originally said it wouldn’t bother touching hardware this year despite qualifying for the scheme. That has now changed.
Brixworth Gets to Work
According to The Race, engineers at Mercedes’ Brixworth facility are readying an ADUO-based step for introduction before the season ends, with no firm date locked in yet. The smart money is on the Azerbaijan, Malaysia and Singapore triple header, which would also line up neatly with the point where George Russell is expected to need a grid drop for fresh power unit components anyway, since his current pool won’t stretch to the end of the year.
There’s a tidy piece of detective work behind where the upgrade is likely to land. At Monza, Kimi Antonelli already knew he was starting from the back after an engine change penalty, so Mercedes could have thrown a completely fresh power unit at his car with zero consequence. Instead it fitted new internal combustion engine, battery and control electronics, but held back on the turbo, MGU-K, exhaust and ancillaries. That’s not an accident. It reads as a team banking a free component change for later in the season, most plausibly the turbo, which is the area with the clearest room for gains.
Mercedes is understood to see little upside in improving the ICE itself, since doing so risks dragging its rating closer to Red Bull’s and handing its title rival the very ADUO leg-up Mercedes itself is currently enjoying. So expect the actual upgrade to sidestep that element entirely. When it lands, both Antonelli and Russell should get it simultaneously, and under the rules Mercedes has to make it available to its customer squads too, meaning Alpine and Williams both stand to benefit whenever it drops.
A Complete Rebuild Looming Too
This ADUO step isn’t happening in isolation. Mercedes has been deliberately conservative with development spending this year and is understood to be lining up a significant chassis upgrade for the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia, its first major package since Montreal in late May. Stack that against an engine upgrade arriving around the same window and Mercedes could be turning up to the Malaysia weekend as a genuinely different, and worse for everyone else, proposition.
It’s worth pointing out who else stands to gain from an ADUO turbo step landing at a Mercedes works team. McLaren runs Mercedes power, and its recent run of race wins has already put pressure on Ferrari in the constructors’ fight. Any further gain from Brixworth doesn’t just widen the gap to Ferrari on power, it potentially widens McLaren’s advantage too.
Ferrari’s Straight-Line Problem Isn’t Going Away
Ferrari introduced the second of its two permitted ADUO upgrades at Monza, reportedly focused on a bigger turbo design, and also raced by Haas’s Oliver Bearman. Team boss Fred Vasseur tried to play down its significance beforehand, but Monza’s straights told a different story entirely.
“[Some] were 10km/h faster on one straight and 10km/h slower on another. The issue was that we were almost 10km/h slower everywhere. When we were putting a bit more energy in one corner, the gap was even bigger in the next straight line. It was quite impossible to manage.” – Fred Vasseur
Lewis Hamilton was even more blunt about what he felt from behind the wheel after Ferrari’s underwhelming Monza weekend, previously covered when he said Ferrari had left it too late to back his title bid.
“We knew that they were fast on the straight, but it was really mind-blowing just how quick they were on the straight. Mercedes power, that thing just keeps pulling, pulling, pulling.” – Lewis Hamilton
Vasseur was careful to note that deployment strategy wasn’t really the root problem, even though it looked that way from outside.
“When you have a lack of pure power, then you start to play with deployment to try to compensate in one straight line. 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 good. Even McLaren, they were playing a little bit Friday and Saturday morning. At the end, we are missing pure power.” – Fred Vasseur
No Quick Fix in Sight
Vasseur’s most honest admission was about timeframe rather than technical detail. Ferrari’s Monza package was its second ADUO step of the year, following changes introduced in Austria back in June, but Vasseur is bracing fans for a long slog rather than a swift correction.
“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…even if you make a couple of horsepower, it’s a good step on the grid. We have a new engine next year, and ADUO 1 in 2027, and ADUO 2. 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.” – Fred Vasseur
That’s Ferrari’s team principal effectively conceding this fight was never going to be won this year, and possibly not next year either. Two ADUO steps have barely dented the gap, and now the team Ferrari is chasing is about to get faster still. Ferrari isn’t just behind on power. Ferrari isn’t just behind on power. It’s behind on power and about to fall further, at exactly the moment its rivals are accelerating away.
