Monza's grandstands overlook the pit straight, the low-drag stage where Haas brought its biggest upgrade of the season for the Italian Grand Prix. Photo: Aron Schmitz/Unsplash.
Formula 1’s power units are supposed to be locked in once the season starts. Under the 2026 regulations, engines were homologated on March 1st and frozen for the year, with exceptions only for changes tied to reliability, safety or cost — none of which are allowed to add performance. So when Oliver Bearman turned a lap at Monza with a genuinely new specification Ferrari power unit sitting behind him, and teammate Esteban Ocon did not, it was worth asking how that’s legal in the first place. The answer says more about Ferrari’s season than anything that happened on Sunday.
The mechanism is called ADUO, the FIA’s in-season catch-up system for manufacturers that fall meaningfully behind on internal combustion performance. Ferrari qualified for extra homologation tokens back in the season’s first assessment window, along with Mercedes, Audi and Honda — Red Bull Ford Powertrains didn’t, and as we detailed when the second verdict landed, that miss has already cost Red Bull any path back into engine development for the rest of 2026. Ferrari’s allowance is the only reason a customer team could show up mid-season with hardware nobody else on the grid was legally permitted to touch. It made for an odd split focus at a Monza weekend that Ferrari had built around its own nostalgia, not a customer squad’s tyre modelling problem.
There was still a catch. Ferrari is only obligated to supply a customer team with one upgraded power unit when the works cars receive a new specification, not two, and Haas didn’t want to wait for a second. Team principal Ayao Komatsu said Haas has previously held upgrades back and introduced them to both cars together, but Monza’s long straights made sitting on free performance too costly to justify. The nod went to Bearman partly because he sits ahead of Ocon in the championship, and partly because of accounting: Haas had already prioritized Ocon for the team’s brake and power-steering upgrades earlier in the season, so, in Komatsu’s words, “this time around it’s back to Ollie.”
Friday made the gamble look smart. Bearman ran eighth-fastest in second practice and described the car as a “night and day difference” versus Haas’s form in recent months — legitimate praise from a driver who hadn’t scored since Canada in May, on a team that hadn’t had both cars in the points together since Ocon’s result in Monaco the following month.
Sunday reset the mood. Bearman ran as high as tenth before Yuki Tsunoda picked him off, missed the Virtual Safety Car window that rearranged the order behind him, and dropped to fifteenth by the flag. Ocon, still running the previous-specification engine, finished sixteenth. Bearman was characteristically blunt about it afterward: “we just weren’t quick enough,” he said, adding that the upgrade had produced “a step forward” without fully solving the car’s balance.
Komatsu’s explanation went further than tyre wear as an excuse — he framed it as the actual technical problem. “Our fundamental issue was a much higher tyre degradation on both cars in comparison to our competitors,” he said, adding that Haas has parts “inconsistency” issues it hasn’t fully diagnosed. That’s a more useful sentence than any lap time from Monza, because it means the new power unit and aero package did what they were supposed to do — Komatsu was explicit that the upgrade is “working on both cars” — while a separate mechanical variable ate the gains before they reached the stopwatch. An engine upgrade cannot fix a tyre model problem, no matter how many homologation tokens are behind it.
Haas isn’t the only midfield team learning that horsepower isn’t this year’s deciding variable. Cadillac is still chasing its first point of the season and just changed team principals rather than engine suppliers to try to fix it — a reminder that in 2026’s frozen-engine landscape, the teams struggling hardest are increasingly fighting mechanical and set-up problems that no amount of legal power unit development can touch.
The standings explain why Haas took the risk of an unequal engine split in the first place. The team sits seventh in the constructors’ championship with 21 points, five ahead of Audi, and neither rival scored at Monza, so the gap held. Inside the garage, the split is starker: Bearman carries 18 of Haas’s 21 points to Ocon’s three, a gap that will matter if it shapes which driver keeps getting first access to future upgrades.
The follow-up question now heads to Madrid, where Formula 1 races for the first time ever this weekend. Nobody arrives with historical data on tyre degradation there, which strips away one of Monza’s variables and puts Haas’s actual race pace on a cleaner data set. Whether Ocon gets his own matching power unit, and whether Komatsu’s engineers have actually found the source of that “inconsistency” by Friday practice, will tell us more about the rest of Haas’s season than one upgrade ever could.
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