Charles Leclerc's Ferrari during FP1 at the 2025 Japan Grand Prix. Photo by Liauzh via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Ferrari has spent most of 2026 insisting its power unit is the one part of the car it can’t simply engineer its way past. The FIA’s own data backs that up: Maranello was found to be running more than four percent behind the season’s benchmark internal combustion engine through the first review period of the year, which is why Ferrari now holds two extra development tokens under the FIA’s Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities scheme for both 2026 and 2027, one more than a manufacturer sitting in the smaller two-to-four percent band would receive. What the rulebook doesn’t do is erase the grid penalty that still comes with actually using one of those tokens on Charles Leclerc before the season runs out.
That question traces back to Monza. Leclerc’s home race lasted less than two laps: after a tight opening-lap fight with team mate Lewis Hamilton, he ran off at the Parabolica on Lap 2 and buried the SF-26 in the barriers hard enough to trigger a red flag, though he walked away unhurt. It was a painful way to end a weekend built around Ferrari’s second power-unit specification change of the season, introduced specifically to chase down that four-percent deficit and fitted to both cars for the Italian Grand Prix.
Recovering a component from a heavy shunt and trusting it again in competition are two different engineering decisions, and Ferrari clearly wasn’t ready to make the second one immediately. Leclerc arrived in Madrid a week later still level with Hamilton on the timesheets, the pair sharing row two of the grid at P4 and P5, and salvaged fourth in the race after a long-shot strategy that gambled on a Safety Car that never came. None of that required a grid penalty. Ferrari simply hadn’t yet reached the point of needing to introduce a new element outside Leclerc’s season allocation.
That point is coming, and team principal Fred Vasseur said as much heading into Baku. Speaking to Canal+ during the Madrid weekend, he confirmed Ferrari expects to take an engine penalty with Leclerc “at some point” this season and floated Azerbaijan as a round that could suit the timing, stopping short of confirming anything more specific. It’s a useful reminder of how ADUO actually works: the scheme grants Ferrari the right to introduce upgraded specifications of components like the internal combustion engine, turbocharger or MGU-K beyond what a normal season allows, but it says nothing about the separate count of physical elements each driver can use before the standard penalty framework kicks in. Whatever fresh part Ferrari eventually fits to Leclerc’s car still has to slot into the same allocation math as every other engine on the grid, upgraded or not: a ten-place penalty the first time a driver exceeds it, five places every time after that.
Aston Martin already ran a version of this exact playbook at Madrid, absorbing a grid penalty of its own to fit a new Honda specification, which is as good a sign as any that this kind of housekeeping is standard business up and down the grid this season. Ferrari’s version is only louder because of who’s driving the car and why the spare part needed inspecting in the first place.
Baku is a logical place to absorb that hit. The street circuit runs cars down more than a mile of straight before the first serious braking zone, long enough that a car with a genuine pace advantage can recover several grid positions before the race has properly started. Losing ten places costs less at a track built around one enormous passing zone than it does somewhere overtaking demands a mistake from the car ahead, which is presumably the calculation Vasseur was making out loud.
There’s also a championship reason to care about the timing beyond Leclerc’s own race. Ferrari sits second in the constructors’ standings, 145 points behind Mercedes and only 52 clear of a McLaren team that has kept pace all season without any engine relief at all. Nine rounds remain after Baku’s return to the calendar on September 24-26, and every point Ferrari spends on a grid penalty is a point it isn’t spending trying to close a gap that a faster engine was supposed to help shrink in the first place. Leclerc, for what it’s worth, isn’t racing for his seat while any of this plays out. He signed a contract extension in June that runs beyond the end of 2028, so whatever Ferrari decides at Baku is purely a results calculation, not a leverage play.
What’s worth watching this weekend isn’t only whether Ferrari pulls the trigger. It’s whether the team treats Friday practice as a chance to bank the penalty early and qualify with the fastest version of the car available, or waits for a clearer read on which of the remaining races will hurt the least. Either way, the engine Ferrari built to solve its competitiveness problem is, for at least one round, going to cost it grid positions instead of clawing them back.
About the Author
