Ferrari · QUICK TAKE
Ferrari's engine upgrade went backwards in Austria. Silverstone looms.
A deceptive qualifying masked how far Ferrari's power unit still trails, and the Red Bull Ring's long straights made the deficit impossible to hide on Sunday.
Saturday in Austria felt like a revival. Charles Leclerc qualified 2nd and Lewis Hamilton 3rd, sandwiching the Mercedes pair on the grid just as they had done in Barcelona. Ferrari had arrived with a new power unit, its first ADUO-mandated upgrade, and the lap times seemed to confirm it was working.
By Sunday evening, both drivers were baffled. Hamilton crossed the line 26 seconds behind George Russell. Leclerc was a further 19 seconds behind Hamilton in 8th. Fourth-best team, well beaten by Mercedes, Red Bull, and McLaren. The upgrade had worked, technically. It just had not been nearly enough.
The qualifying gap had been hiding something important. According to The Race, Russell was forced to lift for waved yellow flags for Verstappen’s crashed car at Turn 9. The real Mercedes advantage was closer to four to five tenths over Ferrari, not the two and a half tenths the timing screens suggested. On a circuit as short as the Red Bull Ring, four to five tenths is a significant structural gap, not a margin you close with strategy or tyres.
“On Friday we were down six tenths just in straightline speed. It is deployment. Ours tails off. Particularly compared to Mercedes, they just keep going.”
Lewis Hamilton, post-race
That is the clearest statement of the problem. Ferrari’s new internal combustion engine arrived in Austria producing more power than its predecessor, but the ADUO ruling had already told the story before a wheel was turned in race trim. The FIA judged Ferrari’s ICE to be more than 4% off the ADUO benchmark, entitling the team to two mid-season upgrades and two further upgrades for 2027. According to The Race, the actual deficit to the Red Bull Powertrains benchmark is believed to be somewhere between 6% and 8%. One upgrade was never going to close that.
The Red Bull Ring exposes what Barcelona conceals. Barcelona’s layout offers frequent braking zones and tight sections where a car can recharge its battery, meaning teams with a weaker ICE can lean on their hybrid deployment more aggressively. Austria’s long flat-out runs to Turn 4 and through the back section demand sustained power across the full length of the straight, and the hybrid system cannot compensate when the ICE is not producing enough energy to recover in the first place. According to The Race, GPS traces showed Ferrari losing 20km/h to both Mercedes and Red Bull on the run to Turn 4 as its deployment tailed off well before the braking zone.
The turbo is a related but distinct part of the issue. Ferrari’s small turbo provides sharp corner-exit response, which is part of why Saturday looked respectable, but it contributes to the falloff at the end of straights. High altitude makes it worse: the turbo has to work harder in thin air, generating heat that requires management. Hamilton’s race engineer was heard telling him to switch to “mode TS” during the race, a temperature management instruction that costs performance to protect the unit.
“An incredibly difficult race. Very, very low grip overall. Just struggled to have the car and the tyres, especially the rears. Missing a lot of rear grip.”
Charles Leclerc, post-race
Leclerc’s grip complaint points to a second problem the result surfaced. Both Ferrari drivers were forced to three-stop, not by choice but by tyre degradation: the car was working its rear tyres hard while running in clean air at a pace the power unit could not sustain efficiently. The rest of the top ten managed on two stops. When tyre life evaporates under a car that cannot maintain pace on the straights, the strategic options shrink quickly.
Team principal Fred Vasseur acknowledged post-race that Ferrari pushed too hard in the opening laps trying to stay with Mercedes, then reacted too aggressively with strategy, compounding the tyre problem. That is an honest reading, but the root cause is not strategic overreach: it is that the pace ceiling was simply too low to race Mercedes on equal terms at this circuit.
The constructors picture captures the scale of the problem. Mercedes sit on 302 points, Ferrari on 204. Hamilton’s 3rd place in the championship on 125 points keeps him in the title conversation, but Leclerc’s 6th on 79 reflects how inconsistently the car has delivered race pace when raw power matters.
The second power unit upgrade, targeting the turbo, is not expected until Zandvoort or Monza after the summer break, according to The Race. Before then comes Silverstone, and Silverstone is another circuit where Ferrari would rather not have this conversation. Maggotts, Becketts, Copse, and the long run to Vale keep a car at high speed for extended periods. The deployment demand is comparable to Austria; the tyre loading through the high-speed complex is even more severe. Nothing in Ferrari’s Austria data suggests those weaknesses will be hidden at Silverstone the way they were hidden at Barcelona.
Mercedes, meanwhile, brought reliability fixes to Austria that may have addressed the battery vulnerability that had been its main mechanical Achilles heel. If those fixes hold, the performance floor rises further still. The benchmark Ferrari is chasing is not standing still.
Ferrari’s upgrade in Austria worked as advertised, but it was never going to be enough, and Silverstone’s full-throttle layout will ask the same question all over again.