Lewis Hamilton didn’t bother dressing it up in Montreal: Ferrari’s SF-26 simply doesn’t have the punch to live with Mercedes when the road straightens out.
Speaking ahead of Monaco, Hamilton said Ferrari is “massively down” on power compared to the all-conquering Mercedes package that’s swept every race of the 2026 season so far. And his frustration has been audible for weeks, not least over the radio in Canada, where he crossed the line more than 10 seconds behind race-winner Kimi Antonelli.
What made Hamilton’s debrief interesting wasn’t the complaint — drivers always want more power — but the precision of the problem as he sees it. He believes Ferrari can go toe-to-toe with Mercedes through corners and on the brakes, yet gets mugged on the straights even when the new overtake mode is deployed.
“In the moment I’m like ‘I need more power somehow’ because I’m able to hold on or keep up with them through the corners and I can’t push the pedal any further,” Hamilton explained. “And you see them just eking out the straight and you catch them back in the brakes, they eke it out in the straight. It’s really hard.
“Even when you get the overtake [mode], you get within a second, they still pull away. So that’s how much grunt that they have and we’re massively down.”
That’s a striking admission at this stage of Ferrari’s project. On paper, the start to 2026 has been respectable: four podiums in the opening five races, split evenly between Hamilton (China and Miami) and Charles Leclerc (Australia and Japan). After a winless 2025, the Scuderia has at least looked like a team capable of being best of the rest on merit.
But the wider context is brutal. Mercedes hasn’t just been the class of the field — it’s been untouchable, and Antonelli’s run of four straight wins has opened a 43-point cushion over team-mate George Russell in the standings. Ferrari’s points are healthy; its prospects of actually beating Mercedes on a normal circuit, Hamilton effectively concedes, are not.
That’s why Monaco matters. Not as a likely title pivot — it’s still Monaco, where one bad Saturday can wreck your weekend — but as a rare moment in this season’s power-unit hierarchy where the pecking order might be scrambled. Hamilton was candid that Monte Carlo is the outlier that gives Ferrari a credible swing at something bigger than a podium.
“That’s the one track that power is not king,” he said. “I think that’s definitely [dependent on pure] car performance. I think our car could be really strong there.
“I’m really going to focus on making sure I arrive with the same energy as I had this weekend [Canada], really study hard with the engineers to make sure we position the car in the right place from Practice 1.
“And if you take away the power deficit, we’re in the fight with these guys, but unfortunately that’s not the way it is today.”
Ferrari’s engineers will have circled Monaco anyway, but the weekend comes with an extra twist: active aero won’t be available at all. The FIA has effectively banned moveable wings for the entire Monaco Grand Prix weekend — the first time a system in that family has been switched off for a whole event since DRS arrived back in 2011.
For Ferrari, that’s more than a footnote. The SF-26 has run a rotating rear wing since Miami, but that solution won’t be part of the picture in Monte Carlo. Whether that hurts Ferrari, helps it, or simply forces everyone into a more old-school set-up compromise will become clear quickly on Friday — but it does remove one variable from a season increasingly defined by who executes the ‘straight mode’ phase best.
Hamilton has been pointing at that area since as early as China, when he suggested Mercedes’ advantage inflates when the active aero opens. “It seems more so when they open up the ESM — that’s when they take a huge step,” he said at the time. “They seem to have a little bit more deployment, so less de-rating at the end of the straights than some of us.
“So we’ve just got to work on trying to see how we can eke out more from our engine.”
The question, then, isn’t whether Ferrari knows it has a deficit — it clearly does — but what it can realistically do about it under the 2026 framework. That’s where the FIA’s Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities (ADUO) scheme enters the conversation. Ferrari is expected to qualify for the support mechanism aimed at helping power-unit manufacturers who are behind to claw back performance, with Audi and Honda also tipped to be in the initial group.
Hamilton, for his part, is leaning into it. “I really hope with this new rule [ADUO] that enables us to try to improve some performance, so we can get back in the fight with them,” he said.
For Monaco, though, the appeal is simpler: it’s the weekend where Ferrari can park the horsepower argument — at least a little — and see what the SF-26 has when the lap is built around traction, precision and nerve. If Hamilton and Leclerc can put the car where it needs to be from the first practice session, Ferrari might finally get to measure itself against Mercedes without feeling like it’s dragging a parachute down every straight.
Hamilton signed off with a line that felt half promise, half relief: “But Monaco should be fun.”
In 2026, that almost counts as optimism in red.
