Ferrari’s latest recruit from Mercedes didn’t come with a press release, a team photo or a quote from Fred Vasseur. Jasper van Schaick announced it himself on LinkedIn this week, and the most interesting detail wasn’t the badge on the new lanyard. It was the job title: Chassis Vehicle System Specialist, on site in Maranello since October.
That is an odd label for a man who spent almost eight years at Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains in Brixworth, the engine shop, not the car factory. And it says more about where Ferrari’s 2026 problem lives, and how it plans to work around it, than any “engine genius” headline does.
The CV, straight from the source
Van Schaick’s own profile tells a story of a career spent around the back half of a racing car. He started as a graduate engineer at Hewland, designing transmissions and differentials. Next came a year at Advanced Engine Research, where the work included dyno driveline design, the unglamorous business of getting stiffness, inertia and damping right so a test bed behaves like a car.
Mercedes HPP hired him in July 2018. For six years he was a mechanical engineer on what he describes as “numerous systems of the F1 Power Unit,” working with the chassis side on a low-friction, reliable installation. In September 2024 he became a concept engineer, developing new power unit concepts and, in his words, working with chassis teams on “a high performance powertrain package within the race car.” He left in May 2026, a couple of months into the new formula’s first season.
Read those two job descriptions again. At Brixworth, part of his job was to sit across the table from the chassis engineers and negotiate where the engine’s needs end and the car’s begin. In Maranello, he has walked around to the other side of that table.
He also wasn’t supposed to be in Formula 1 at all this autumn. His post says he had been sorting out a return to the Netherlands after 11 years in the UK before “a late change of plans!” The racing, he wrote, was something he would have missed. His sign-off was refreshingly free of corporate gloss: “I’ll try my best.”
The Hamilton angle, minus the fan fiction
Yes, there’s a Lewis Hamilton connection. Van Schaick’s time at HPP covered Hamilton’s 2018, 2019 and 2020 drivers’ titles and Mercedes’ constructors’ titles from 2018 to 2021, all with Brixworth engines. But a mechanical engineer at the engine company is not a race engineer, and nobody should picture a tearful garage reunion at Austin. Hamilton had hundreds of colleagues at Mercedes. This is one of them.
The more meaningful pattern is structural. Ferrari’s chassis department is now run by Technical Director Loic Serra, who joined Mercedes in 2010 and stayed for well over a decade before starting at Maranello on October 1, 2024. Jerome d’Ambrosio, who worked alongside Toto Wolff and ran Mercedes’ young driver programme, arrived the same day as Vasseur’s deputy team principal. Van Schaick isn’t joining a foreign culture. He is joining a technical group that increasingly speaks with a Brackley-and-Brixworth accent.
What the FIA’s engine numbers say about Ferrari
Ferrari’s weakness this year isn’t a matter of opinion. Under the Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities system, the FIA ranks each manufacturer’s internal combustion engine against the best one on the grid. After the first review period, covering the opening five rounds through Canada, Ferrari landed alongside Audi and Honda in the worst band: more than 4% off the leading ICE. That earned each of them two extra homologated power unit upgrades in 2026 and two more in 2027, plus extra cost cap and dyno allowances. Mercedes sat in the 2-4% band and got one each year. After the second period, through Hungary, nobody earned anything new.
Now look at the constructors’ table after Singapore. Mercedes lead on 578 points, but Ferrari are second on 444, ahead of McLaren on 339 and Red Bull on 332. A team the FIA places in the most handicapped engine band is beating two front-running rivals by more than 100 points. That doesn’t happen unless the chassis, aerodynamics and tyre management are carrying a large share of the load.
One caveat matters here. The ADUO index only measures the combustion engine, using engine speed, input shaft torque, MGU-K power and a weighting for how much each factor matters on lap time. It doesn’t capture the full power unit, as we explained when we looked at how F1’s engine yardstick only measures half the engine. Energy recovery, deployment, friction and installation losses all sit outside it. That is exactly the territory a chassis vehicle systems specialist works in.
Why put an engine man in the chassis department
The FIA’s list of permitted ADUO upgrade areas reads like a map of the engine bay: ICE components, exhaust, turbocharger and wastegate, electrical components and sensors, ERS and its cooling, MGU-K, control electronics, hydraulics and fluids. Almost every item touches the car around it. A new turbo or ERS cooling layout isn’t a bolt-on. It can mean new radiators, new ducting, revised bodywork and a different heat load for the aerodynamicists to manage.
The FIA granted Ferrari four of those homologations across this season and next. Our read is that someone who has designed power unit hardware, and knows what an engine department will ask of a chassis team, shortens the loop between “the engine people found power” and “the car can actually use it.” The fastest way to waste an ADUO upgrade is to bring the hardware without the installation.
Now the skeptical part. Van Schaick can’t fix combustion from the chassis side. If Ferrari’s ICE deficit is in the combustion chamber, the fuel or the turbo, that work belongs to the power unit department, and one specialist doesn’t close a gap measured in whole percentage points. What he can do is make sure the kilowatts Ferrari does make reach the rear wheels with as little friction and cooling drag as possible. It is a marginal-gains hire, not a silver bullet. Anyone calling him a “mastermind” is selling something.
It’s also worth remembering what he can’t bring. Mercedes drawings stay at Mercedes. What moves with an engineer is process knowledge: how a championship-winning organisation structures the conversation between the engine and the car. For a team that has spent two years importing Mercedes people, that may be the point.
What to watch next
Austin and Mexico City close the third ADUO window. The FIA’s 2026 calendar of review periods ends with rounds 12 to 18, from the Netherlands to Mexico City. Upgrades aren’t cumulative within a season, so Ferrari’s count is already set. The cost cap relief, though, is assessed period by period, so the final number still matters for the money Ferrari can spend on 2027.
The United States Grand Prix runs October 23-25. Mercedes arrive with Kimi Antonelli able to clinch the drivers’ title in Austin, while Ferrari try to protect second in the constructors’ fight. Hamilton is still digesting a Singapore weekend in which Ferrari’s split strategy left him with the bad half.
Mercedes are spending their own upgrade, and paying for it. Brixworth’s ADUO allowance has a price in grid penalties, as George Russell is finding out. We covered why Mercedes’ upgrade will cost Russell another engine penalty.
The real test comes in 2027. Van Schaick arrived too late to shape much of this year’s car. The useful question for next season isn’t whether Ferrari finds more horsepower, because the FIA has given it room to try. It’s whether that horsepower arrives in a car that was built to receive it. If it does, a LinkedIn post from a Dutch engineer will look smarter than plenty of louder signings.
Sources
- Jasper van Schaick: LinkedIn profile, experience and announcement post
- FIA: ADUO results following the first and second review periods of 2026
- Formula 1: How the ADUO engine upgrade system works
- Formula 1: 2026 constructors’ standings
- Ferrari: Loic Serra and Jerome d’Ambrosio join Scuderia Ferrari HP and Loic Serra profile
- Formula 1: 2026 United States Grand Prix timetable
Lead Image credit: Liauzh / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
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