Leclerc says the old engine cost him at the Madring
Ferrari's decision to hold back the ADUO 2 after Leclerc's Monza crash left the Monegasque running a different power unit to his own team-mate in qualifying.
Charles Leclerc qualified fifth at the Madring, 0.195 seconds off pole and six thousandths behind his own team mate, and he thinks he knows where a good part of that went. He was the only Ferrari driver without the team’s newest engine.
“I think most of the people put a new power unit, or a newer spec, for today and I kind of had the same spec,” Leclerc said after qualifying.
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Four tenths gone in the first sector
Leclerc did not think much was wrong with the lap itself. He pointed instead at one part of the circuit, where he reckons he lost around four tenths of a second in the opening sector alone.
He was careful about the conclusion, though.
That is a driver telling you the honest answer is probably both: some of it power, some of it the corners, and no clean way to separate the two on a circuit nobody had raced on until this weekend.
Ferrari would not commit the ADUO 2 after Monza
Leclerc lost the car at the Parabolica on the second lap of the Italian Grand Prix a week ago and hit the barriers at 60G. The power unit in the back of that car was the ADUO 2, Ferrari’s first engine upgrade of the 2026 season, introduced at its home race.
The team did not feel able to sign that unit off for Madrid without more time to check it for damage. Rather than fit a brand new one and take a grid penalty, Ferrari went back to an ADUO 1 that was already in Leclerc’s pool. It kept him out of trouble with the allocation. It also left him with last month’s engine on a circuit full of long straights.
The ADUO 2 step centres on the turbocharger and on overall power unit efficiency, which is exactly the kind of gain that shows up over a full lap rather than in one corner.
Hamilton had the newer engine and beat him by six thousandths
Lewis Hamilton qualified fourth, 0.189 off pole. Leclerc was fifth, 0.195 off. Two Ferraris, two different engine specifications, six thousandths of a second between them.
That number cuts both ways, and it is the reason this story is more interesting than a straight complaint about hardware. If the ADUO 2 were worth four tenths, the gap between the two cars would not be a rounding error.
Leclerc had also been the quicker Ferrari all weekend on the older engine, third in first practice and second in both second and final practice. He arrived at qualifying looking like Mercedes’ closest challenger and left it fifth.
The stewards took the other Ferrari case off him
There was a second Leclerc file open on Saturday evening, over a delta time between the safety car lines. He was cleared completely: Ferrari had miscalculated the delta and sent him the wrong number, he drove to what his dash told him, and the stewards handed the reprimand to the team instead. The full set of decisions is in our report on the penalties.
Our reading of it: the engine is an alibi, not an answer
Leclerc is not wrong that he was down on equipment, and he is not the one who put himself there either. The team took a cautious call after a 60G accident, which is the right call to take.
But the six thousandths to Hamilton is the number that matters. Whatever the ADUO 2 is worth on this track, it is not worth the gap between fifth and pole, and Ferrari has spent this entire weekend fourth and fifth with two different engines in the back of the two cars. That looks less like a power problem and more like the car being exactly where it has been since Friday.
He said it himself about the Monza crash that started all of this: “that’s on me obviously for last week.”
What Sunday asks of him
Fifth on a circuit where overtaking is expected to be difficult, with a team mate directly ahead on better equipment, is an awkward place to start a race you need points from.
The one thing in his favour is that nobody has meaningful long run data, because a red flag ate the second half of final practice. On tyre wear this weekend everybody is guessing, and a driver who is quick over a stint can still make Sunday look very different from Saturday.
The Spanish Grand Prix starts at 15:00 local time. Follow it on the RNT-Motorsports live blog.
