Ferrari will introduce an upgraded power unit at this weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix, the team confirmed through power unit Technical Director Enrico Gualtieri, as the Scuderia look to chip away at Mercedes’ advantage atop both championships.
The upgrade, which falls under the 2026 ADUO (Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities) allowance, arrives alongside a new fuel from partner Shell. It follows Lewis Hamilton’s breakthrough first victory for Ferrari at the previous round in Barcelona, a result that ended Mercedes’ winning start to the season and the new era of regulations.
Gualtieri described the update as incremental rather than transformative, tempering expectations while emphasizing the team’s relentless development culture.
“The update we are bringing to Spielberg is a relatively minor one and it’s the result of the work completed in recent weeks to transfer improvements from our development programme to the track,” Gualtieri said. “It epitomises key principles of our sport: continuous improvement, reacting quickly, and deploying gains at the earliest opportunity.”
The Italian squad currently sits second in the constructors’ standings with 190 points, trailing Mercedes’ 262. In the drivers’ championship, Hamilton holds second place on 115 points, 41 behind Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli on 156. Charles Leclerc, who has endured a difficult stretch of mechanical failures, trails his teammate Hamilton by 40 points and has not finished on the podium since the Miami Sprint.
Gualtieri outlined the broader philosophy driving Ferrari’s development approach, noting that the team has pursued parallel workstreams since the start of the 2026 project.
“Since the beginning of the 2026 project, we have combined a continuous development approach with longer-term development programmes, to fully exploit all available opportunities to increase the performance of our power unit,” he said. “These two streams run in parallel and often reinforce each other.”
He was careful to frame the upgrade within realistic competitive expectations. “As mentioned, this update is not a major step, and it will not, on its own, change the competitive order,” Gualtieri said. “In a championship as competitive as this one, it is unrealistic to expect a single update to transform the overall picture, especially under the current homologation and development constraints. Performance is built progressively, not only through hardware changes, but also through how effectively you optimise the package race by race.”
Leclerc, who suffered brake issues that put him into the wall at Monaco and retired from Barcelona with a power steering failure, expressed cautious optimism about the upgrade and his own prospects at the Red Bull Ring.
“First of all, the team is doing an incredible job in pushing like crazy on every single component of the car,” Leclerc said. “There’s the development of these pieces, but there is also the production of these pieces and everybody is just pushing to the maximum. I think this is the result of it.”
Asked whether the upgrade could make Ferrari favorites for the weekend, Leclerc was measured. “I don’t think so. There are quite a few straight lines here and they’re quite long as well. I still believe that Mercedes have got the stronger power unit so I think they’ll get back a little bit of the advantage that they had before,” he said. “I think we can be in the mix, especially in the race. I think in qualifying we might be a bit more on the back foot.”
The Monegasque driver said his primary goal is simply completing a clean race weekend after two consecutive retirements robbed him of points.
“I’m looking forward to just having a clean weekend,” Leclerc said. “Montreal and Monaco have been difficult because the feeling just was not there, then we changed a few things for Barcelona and it was back there. The last two weekends there were no points on the Sunday for mechanical issues so I just hope we get back to where we should be.”
Leclerc praised Hamilton’s recent form and the broader team effort, adding: “Lewis has done an incredible job and the team have been pushing massively on new parts, so I’m really looking forward to hopefully being back on the podium, if not more from this weekend.”
The power unit upgrade follows a significant car update that Ferrari deployed in Barcelona, where Hamilton’s victory demonstrated the team’s capacity to challenge Mercedes on race day. Whether the cumulative gains from both packages can sustain that challenge on the high-speed Red Bull Ring layout, where long straights could favor Mercedes’ power advantage, will become clear when practice begins.