Lando Norris has fired a stark warning about Ferrari’s potential after Lewis Hamilton’s maiden Ferrari victory at the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix handed the Scuderia their first win of the 2025 season. Speaking to Sky Sports after finishing third, Norris made clear that Ferrari engine improvements could turn the Italian outfit into an unstoppable force — and that nobody on the grid should feel comfortable.
Ferrari Engine Improvements Could Leave the Grid in the Dust
Norris was brutally honest after crossing the line behind Hamilton and Mercedes’ George Russell. “We’re lucky that Ferrari doesn’t have a better engine at the minute,” the reigning champion said. “If they had a better engine, they’re dominating. They’re the class of the field in terms of cornering performance at the minute. We’re not even close to them.”
Furthermore, Norris didn’t sugarcoat McLaren’s position. “We’re a long, long way from where we need to be. If they make improvements on the engine side, then they’ll embarrass everyone.” Hamilton himself had been consistently vocal about Ferrari possessing the finest aerodynamic package on the grid, with a lack of outright power the one thing holding his SF-25 back. That assessment makes Norris’s warning all the more credible.
Mercedes had gone unbeaten before Sunday’s result in Barcelona, so the significance of Hamilton breaking that streak should not be understated. The engineering partnership Hamilton has built at Ferrari is already bearing fruit — and the engine situation could be about to swing firmly in Ferrari’s favour.
ADUO Rankings Hand Ferrari a Significant Upgrade Pathway
The timing of Norris’s concerns is particularly sharp given the FIA’s newly released Additional Upgrade and Development Opportunities — known as ADUO — rankings. The governing body spent the opening races benchmarking all five manufacturers’ internal combustion engines, then ranked the remaining four on a percentage deficit scale, granting those behind the leader additional upgrade allocations within the cost cap.
According to the BBC, Red Bull’s engine sits as the current benchmark ICE, with Mercedes judged second. Remarkably, Ferrari ranked even further back — the FIA assessed them as 4% behind the benchmark — meaning the Scuderia should benefit from multiple additional upgrade opportunities across 2025 and 2026. Red Bull, meanwhile, have questioned their classification as benchmark, having expected to rank behind Mercedes, and the FIA is set to provide all five manufacturers with a detailed breakdown of the measuring formula.
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella, who spent years at Ferrari during the Michael Schumacher era, backed up Norris’s assessment. “We see, especially in the medium speed corners, that Ferrari is the fastest, not necessarily the fastest in the straights,” Stella noted. The combination of a class-leading chassis and a closing engine deficit is exactly the kind of trajectory that keeps rival engineers awake at night. Hamilton and Ferrari may have played down talk of a championship fight after Barcelona, but the rest of the grid would be foolish to ignore the warning signs.
