Fred Vasseur says Ferrari still missing pure power despite second ADUO power upgrade

The Scuderia were hoping that an upgraded power unit will help them deliver a decent results for the Tifosi at their home Grand Prix, but aside from their drivers' amateurish conduct on track, the SF-26 turned out to be painfully slow with no chance to fight Mercedes grunt at a track like Monza where power is paramount.

Fred Vasseur claimed the upgrade was not a game changer and quipped: "At least I was right on something," in the aftermath of a disastrous race for Ferrari whose performance issues compounded with Charles Leclerc's crash just after he tangled with Lewis Hamilton, dropping him down the order.

Vasseur went on: “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.

“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.

“Honestly, it's not about deployment," he claimed. "I think deployment was okay-ish; even McLaren, they were playing a little bit Friday and Saturday morning. At the end, we are missing pure power.

“The reality of this is that if you are missing X in Zandvoort, you are two or three tenths [off the pace]. If you are missing X minus—I'm using letters because you will try to extrapolate—if you are missing a bit less than X in Monza, the delta with the Merc is two times bigger," he explained.

Vasseur's explanation was clearly pointing at an underpowered internal combustion engine (ICE). So were Ferrari paying for early design decisions? They have gone for a smaller turbo, after all, which gives them lighting starts but no high-end power.

Vasseur commented: “On the engine, the process is mega long because the lead time of the parts is long and the cost cap is not easy. You have to produce the engine for the season.

"You are already a bit like this, and if you want to start to do the development, you have to produce a new batch of engines, and it's tricky.

“We were not expecting to recover [with] ADUO 1 or ADUO 2," he revealed. "We are doing small steps, but what you have to keep in mind is that if you make a small step on the engine, even if you make a couple of horsepower, it's a good step on the grid.

“That means that now we will have a new engine next year. For sure, 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," the Frenchman concluded.

Ferrari also provided Haas' Oliver Bearman with the new ADUO-upgraded power unit, and while the Briton qualified a bit better, he gave credit to the aero upgrades the American team brought to Monza.

Bearman said of the power unit upgrade: “It's a much smaller step than what the [chassis] upgrade was, let's say.

"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.

“Of course, more power is always nice, but you've read the news about how much it is. It's definitely beneficial, but the biggest step was the [chassis] upgrade, which was more than twice or three times the amount of power we got from the engine—which is testament to the team's hard work.

"And I'm really, really proud of them for that," Bearman ventured. (Reporting by Agnes Carlier)