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Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur has spoken in detail about the aggressive development targets at Maranello for the second half of the season.
With one victory each for Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc in the first half of 2026, Ferrari’s objective is to win races more consistently after the summer break.
In terms of the deficit to Mercedes, both Ferrari and British rivals McLaren have slowly reduced the gap – via the introduction of effective updates.
Despite Ferrari’s bold development push until now, Fred Vasseur makes clear that the volume of new components arriving to the circuit won’t be slowing down.
Ferrari stick to consistent development philosophy
Both on and off-track, teams choose different strategies and approaches to optimise performance and secure the best results.
On the development front, some teams prefer to introduce massive upgrade packages all at once – evidenced most recently by Aston Martin and McLaren in Hungary.
Others, such as Ferrari, believe the more effective philosophy is to consistently introduce small updates as often as possible. This methodology means that teams won’t take a massive leap forward in one weekend, but also allows for lap-time to be regularly unlocked from race to race.
Moving forward, Fred Vasseur wants to keep this approach and constantly improve the SF-26:
“Our approach in the second half of the year will remain the same,” he told Gazzetta.
“We want to take it one race at a time and focus on ourselves. As always with the Sprint format, we will only have one practice session before qualifying – which makes preparation, and getting everything right from the first laps, even more important.
“We want to bring new developments to every race. Our rivals bring very large packages, preferring a different strategy than ours.
“There are still many races to go this season, and we have plenty of room for improvement on the chassis, so we’ll keep pushing.
“Talking about the championship is something we don’t do in Maranello. We focus on improving our car, and extracting the best from each race weekend, nothing else.”
The questions left to answer
As Vasseur outlines, there won’t be any massive individual packages for the SF-26. Instead, a few components will be steadily drip-fed to the track as soon as they are available.
The good news for Ferrari is that many updates are still in the pipeline, meaning more performance is on the table for the Maranello-based squad to exploit.
Simultaneously, it should be noted that there will be one individual update introduced all at once – Ferrari’s new power unit.
The Mercedes power unit has been its largest and most consistent advantage over the Scuderia in 2026, which is something Vasseur and his personnel are conscious of. Whilst aerodynamic updates will arrive regularly, there will be one engine update this season, which is scheduled to arrive at the Italian GP in Monza.
Although there are no guarantees how much time the new power unit will deliver, the objective at Ferrari is clear – capitalise on ADUO (Additional Development Upgrade Opportunities) and eliminate the deficit to Mercedes.
Featured image credit: Ferrari Media Centre
