Ferrari's Step Forward in Power Unit Performance

Ferrari didn’t arrive with a miracle. It arrived with a step.

For Fred Vasseur, that’s enough for now.

The Ferrari team principal is usually the first to pour cold water on talk of game‑changing upgrades, yet even he sounded quietly satisfied after the debut of the team’s latest power unit under the FIA’s Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities (ADUO) framework. The numbers still say Ferrari is down on power. The track, though, suggested progress.

Charles Leclerc ended FP2 second quickest, just 0.120s off George Russell’s Mercedes. No fireworks, no headline-grabbing gulf. But there was a sharper, more rounded Ferrari underneath him, and that mattered more than the timesheet.

Power deficit, different strengths

On the straights, the old story remained. What Lewis Hamilton has called a “considerable” deficit to Mercedes was laid bare when Leclerc’s best FP2 lap was overlaid with Russell’s. The Ferrari bled time down the first two-thirds of the lap, losing roughly six tenths as the Mercedes stretched its legs.

Then the pattern flipped.

Leclerc clawed some of that back under braking and through the corners, particularly late in the lap. Russell suffered more clipping on the run to Parabolica, and on an energy-hungry circuit the fine margins in harvesting and deployment became obvious. Teams and drivers up and down the pitlane agreed: there’s still a lot of performance locked away in how the cars manage their hybrid systems here.

Vasseur’s view was blunt.

“You have to keep in mind the performance in the straight line is the drag, the weight of the car, it's everything, it's not just the engine,” he said. “We did a step for sure, and we didn't bring ADUO 2 for nothing, but I think we still have a decent gap.”

The step is real. So is the gap.

Hamilton feels the gains – and the limits

Hamilton’s day was more complicated. After set-up tweaks in FP2, he wrestled with a car that, in his words, was “really hard to pull the lap out of” and “not an easy one to drive”. Balance issues bit, yet he still saw a path forward in both set-up and energy management.

He pointed straight at the trade-off teams are juggling: drag versus deployment.

“That's what we need to look into, if it's that [or] if it's the deployment,” he said when asked whether trimming downforce – and therefore drag – might unlock more speed.

He did, however, underline the progress made with Mercedes’ own engine update.

“The engine is an improvement, which I'm really grateful for the guys back at the factory for working on. But our deployment schedule is different to the others, our competitors. It seems like they maybe have less drag for the straights, so that's something we need to definitely look at.”

One area did bring him comfort. Hamilton described the engine as “really nice to drive in the low speed”. On a day when the balance wasn’t where he wanted it, that mattered.

Leclerc leads Ferrari’s charge

Leclerc, though, carried Ferrari’s hopes in more than just qualifying simulations. Over the long runs, his pace stacked up well.

His stint on softs averaged just three hundredths of a second per lap slower than Kimi Antonelli’s run on hards in the Mercedes. The tyre offset is significant and makes any direct comparison tricky, but even with that caveat, Ferrari looked like the closest challenger over a race stint.

Most still expect Mercedes to hold the upper hand once overnight tweaks are dialled in. On Friday’s evidence, though, Ferrari is not drifting in no-man’s-land. It’s in the fight.

Red Bull on the back foot – and still dangerous

Lurking behind the Mercedes–Ferrari story was a familiar wildcard: Red Bull. This time, it was the world champions scrambling.

Max Verstappen missed FP1 as Ayumu Iwasa took over his car, and when he climbed in for FP2 he found a machine that didn’t behave. He complained of balance problems, echoing the frustrations that surfaced at Zandvoort.

Red Bull technical director Pierre Wache did not sugar-coat it.

“Clearly we have a balance issue on the car,” he said. “A little bit like Zandvoort, to be honest, and we try to understand what the issue is, try to fix it in a different way by setup and car components.

“It's the main thing we are working on. What doesn't help is when Max didn’t drive during FP1 and he jumped in the car there, we have less time to react and now we have to react for FP3.”

While Verstappen chased a window that never quite opened, the other Red Bull quietly stitched together one of the most impressive long runs of the day. Liam Lawson, juggling preparation for both his current team and Racing Bulls amid uncertainty over Isack Hadjar’s fitness, delivered a hard-tyre stint that matched Antonelli’s average.

There is context. Both Leclerc and Antonelli hit traffic during their runs, which may have flattered Red Bull’s numbers slightly. Even so, Lawson’s consistency on the hards was a reminder: Red Bull can look lost on Friday and still be a threat when it counts.

McLaren searching for answers

McLaren, so often the benchmark in recent weeks, found itself a step behind. Lando Norris, winner of the last two grands prix, described the day as “much trickier than the last few Fridays”.

The timing sheets backed him up. On long runs, Norris was 0.443s off the leading pace on hards. On overall pace he was 0.384s adrift. The more worrying detail for McLaren was where the time vanished.

“It's a bit everywhere, honestly,” Norris admitted. “There's not one corner we're quicker than anyone else ahead of us.

“We're losing a bit in the straights compared to Mercedes, which we kind of expect, but also the high speed is where we lose most of our laptime, which is normally where we're quick. So we have to try and figure out a few things, but we're just off the pace everywhere at the minute.”

When McLaren isn’t king of the high-speed sections, alarm bells ring. Friday didn’t bring panic, but it did bring a long to‑do list for the engineers overnight.

Midfield: Racing Bulls lead, Haas encouraged

Behind the heavyweights, the midfield shuffled again.

Arvid Lindblad set the tone for a strong day for Racing Bulls, topping the group. Just 0.021s back, though, was Haas rookie Ollie Bearman, who extracted encouraging speed from a car in the middle of a major upgrade push.

Both Haas VF-26s carried a significant aerodynamic package, but only Bearman had access to the upgraded Ferrari engine, with the team having just one unit available this weekend. Team principal Ayao Komatsu liked what he saw.

He confirmed the new engine is “delivering in terms of characteristics”, a welcome boost for a team that has gone six races without a point. The sting in the tail remains the “inconsistency issues” that have dogged both cars recently, with Esteban Ocon among those affected.

On longer runs, Haas slipped behind Racing Bulls and Alpine. Franco Colapinto, who had been delighted with his Alpine in FP1, later described the car as “disconnected” in FP2. Even so, for Haas in particular, Friday felt like a step in the right direction rather than another dead end.

Audi’s gear gamble and Williams’ holding pattern

Audi opted against aerodynamic upgrades and instead played its joker, altering the homologated gear ratios and final drive. The expectation was a tidy gain; the reality was more muted.

The car struggled more than anticipated against the sharp end of the midfield. On single-lap pace Audi sat only just ahead of Carlos Sainz’s Williams, and on long-run pace it slipped a fraction behind.

Sainz ran soft tyres as Williams treated Friday as an experimental session, using the track time to prepare for a major upgrade package due in Azerbaijan later in the month. For now, Williams is in a holding pattern, trying to squeeze the last drops from its current specification while waiting for the real reinforcements to arrive.

Aston Martin still stuck

At the back, a familiar subplot resurfaced. Aston Martin’s struggles, predicted before the weekend, duly materialised despite the upgraded Honda engine introduced at Zandvoort two weeks ago.

There were positives, if you squinted. Driveability improved, just as the team had hoped. Lance Stroll called it “a little bit better”. But when Valtteri Bottas could say Cadillac “have the upper hand on the straights”, any realistic hope of repeating Fernando Alonso’s Zandvoort points heroics faded.

Aston Martin is no longer simply chasing the front. It is fighting to stay clear of the back.

Ferrari, by contrast, stands somewhere in between. The new power unit hasn’t rewritten the pecking order, but it has sharpened the tools Leclerc and his team need for the season ahead. The deficit is still there. The question now is whether this step is the start of a climb, or just a brief pause on the plateau.