The management and reliability of Power Units risk becoming quite a strange issue in this final season before the regulatory overhaul. The upcoming changes will specifically concern the power units that will drive F1 cars starting next year.
With engine development essentially frozen for several seasons now, it seems rather odd that teams like Ferrari—and especially Mercedes—are reporting repeated reliability problems. That power units require continuous development and numerous checks at the beginning of a new regulatory era is generally accepted, but occurrences like those seen in the first nine races of 2025 are truly peculiar.
Mercedes, so many retirements: three in the last three races
Nine races in, and the Mercedes power unit has already caused numerous problems both for the factory team and its customer teams. Three retirements in the last three Grands Prix. Antonelli was stopped by an electrical issue in Imola and an oil pressure loss in Barcelona, while Alonso lost an entire cylinder in Monaco.
A wave of engine failures for the Stuttgart manufacturer. So far, only McLaren appears completely unaffected. Not to mention Ferrari, which—after the retirements suffered by Haas’s Oliver Bearman and Sauber’s Gabriel Bortoleto during the Miami GP due to technical reasons—seems to have decided to manage the power unit in its two SF-25s differently, running with a less aggressive engine mapping.
The situation might be less worrying than it seems
The situation is, to say the least, alarming—one might even say disheartening—at Mercedes, and Ferrari is certainly on alert. But how much is there really to worry about? Starting from the basic premise that it’s unusual to see so many reliability issues in the season preceding a regulation change, this raises another question: is someone experimenting?
That might be the case—it’s a hypothesis, and a likely one. From 2026, new fuels will be introduced that will require combustion engines to operate under parameters very different from the current ones. It’s been years since an F1 engine lost a cylinder—perhaps the last time was Daniel Ricciardo’s Red Bull in 2018 (if memory serves). If there were other cases, they’ve been unheard of for quite some time.
For teams like Mercedes and Ferrari, it wouldn’t be foolish to carry out such testing now. McLaren is light-years ahead in the Constructors’ standings, and with Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri seemingly only threatened by Max Verstappen, it would make sense to push forward with 2026 development if there’s already a chance to collect useful data in some areas.
For now, we stress, this is only a supposition—but we’ll be looking into the matter more closely in the coming weeks.
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