From the impact of major upgrade packages to new problems being exposed across various teams, here are 10 things we learned from Formula 1’s Miami Grand Prix.
The real power of the development war
Some intriguing performance shifts over the Miami GP weekend have highlighted how powerful F1’s 2026 development war is likely to be.
With Mercedes a standalone among the top teams in holding fire on a major upgrade package for now, the weekend offered a proper reference point to judge the steps that rivals had made with their own developments.
Red Bull’s revamp transformed its fortunes. Having previously been a distant fourth, it was a front-row challenger here, as aerodynamic tweaks and a steering change helped Max Verstappen unleash a lot more from the RB22.
Ferrari perhaps did not get as much as it wanted from the extensive changes to the SF-26, but McLaren definitely did from its car – as it became the first squad to beat Mercedes to a chequered flag this season with its sprint race success.
The pace shifts among the top four highlighted that aero gains are going to be aggressive this season, but all eyes are now on Canada because Mercedes will pull the pin on its own W17 revamp – as McLaren runs the second half of its overhaul of the MCL40, which will include a new front wing.
Could those Montreal changes help those two outfits pull clear at the front?
A Russell weakness exposed
Nothing about how things have played out so far has been particularly smooth on George Russell’s side – whether it’s been getting bogged down at race starts and on safety car restarts, dicing with the Ferraris, or being a step behind his team-mate Kimi Antonelli, as was the case throughout the Miami weekend.
Miami was described by Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff as Antonelli’s “best race so far” in F1, just as Russell endured what he called “a very tough race” in which he was so lost in terms of how to drive the car that he was using the final 20 laps as an experiment in his search for greater pace.
There’s something about the smooth Miami track surface that upsets Russell’s natural equilibrium and appears to play to Antonelli’s strengths. Russell admits he prefers higher-grip situations, a bit like what we see with Oscar Piastri vs Lando Norris at McLaren.
This is why Russell says he “can’t wait” for upcoming races in more ordinary conditions – by which he means, rougher tracks and less heat.
The next race in Canada will be a huge test, because it’s where Russell took the first of his two wins in 2025 and will also be where Mercedes introduces its first major car upgrade of 2026.
If Antonelli is on top in Montreal, then Russell really will have cause for concern.
Audi’s teetering on a reliability crisis
The credibility of Audi’s debut F1 season is swinging dramatically between quite impressive performance and a quite worrying run of niggling problems with big consequences.
Its efforts in Miami were persistently undermined by the latter, which leaves the new manufacturer teetering on a reliability crisis.
A non-start for one of its cars in each of the first two races of the season was bad but Audi cannot afford to continue at or even close to the level of what Nico Hulkenberg called a “proper character building” Miami weekend.
Hulkenberg failed to start the sprint after a leak led to a fire on an installation lap; Gabriel Bortoleto was disqualified from that race because of a spike in engine intake air pressure; Bortoleto then needed a gearbox change before qualifying and later suffered a brake fire at the end of Q1; and finally Hulkenberg retired from the grand prix early on due to engine overheating.
These problems do not seem to be connected, which continues a trend of Audi tripping over different things. Some of them also appear to be operational rather than linked to the engine’s design: for example, the leak that led to the Hulkenberg sprint fire was noticed earlier, but the team thought it was addressed. That misjudgement led to a far greater consequence than it otherwise could have.
Even though the causes are different the outcome is the same: Audi’s suffering repeated setbacks, missing mileage, and unable to make as much progress as it otherwise could.
As Hulkenberg said: “We need to sort ourselves out more.”
Aston Martin’s new urgent fix isn’t Honda
Aston Martin’s biggest early-season headache has been banished.
After the run of weekends where vibrations were the biggest limiting factor for both performance and reliability (and even driver comfort), countermeasures introduced for Miami worked a treat.
As Fernando Alonso said after qualifying, the vibrations had not just been reduced. “Gone. I would say gone,” he said on a weekend when Aston Martin got both its cars to the chequered flag for the first time in 2026.
But while banishing the vibrations is a critical step, it does not mean that its woes are over: because the end of one big problem simply means the next one is rearing its head.
Alonso said that the priority is now to get on top of some gearbox headaches – and to do so quickly.
“It’s the electronics or something,” he said. “It was very weird on the downshifts and the upshifts. So not very well in control.
“That’s the fix number one for Canada I think, with all the heavy braking.”
Aston Martin still faces a long and difficult journey to get to where it wants to be.
Ferrari sim taking Hamilton in ‘wrong direction’
Though Ferrari’s upgraded car looked quite potent at times this weekend, it lost performance when it counted. And Lewis Hamilton was never really as competitive as he expected.
He wasn’t even close to Charles Leclerc for most of the event, even before some damage on lap one of the grand prix set him up for a long and unsuccessful afternoon.
Hamilton’s main takeaway, in fact, was that he will start preparing for the weekend differently in Canada – as he thinks the simulator is taking him in “the wrong direction”.
“I might cut that out for now and give it a run without,” Hamilton said after his feeling in the car shifted through practice, the sprint and then qualifying.
“You go on it, you prepare for the track, you drive it and you get the car set-up to a certain place and then you come to the track and that set-up doesn’t work.”
Hamilton did end up the lead Ferrari, though, thanks to Leclerc’s final-lap spin and subsequent penalty for repeatedly cutting corners while trying to wrestle his damaged car to the finish.
Leclerc’s early role in the fight for the win had already faded badly thanks to Ferrari’s surprising lack of race pace. Leclerc said he had “massive” degradation on the medium tyre, and that even on the hard compound he never felt as comfortable as he had during the sprint.
The fact this happened despite Ferrari bringing a lot of developments to what already looked like a really solid car is a bit of a blow. But Leclerc was adamant this upgrade worked, which suggests Ferrari must search for another reason why it struggled.
And though Leclerc doesn’t feel there’s a pattern of Ferrari drifting away in races, it still hasn’t been able to sustain a challenge after any of its bright starts – a disappointing trend that continued in Miami.
Hadjar had his first Red Bull ‘disaster’
Isack Hadjar suffered a self-described “disaster” of a Miami weekend due to a combination of a straightline speed problem, his own lack of pace at times, Red Bull’s error getting him disqualified from qualifying and finally Hadjar crashing out of the grand prix early.
His recovery from the pitlane lasted just four-and-a-half laps before a careless wall-strike put him out on the spot. But this weekend had a worryingly familiar narrative: the second driver struggling on a weekend Verstappen took a massively upgraded Red Bull to new heights.
Red Bull defended Hadjar in this regard, and he himself felt he had made good progress in the car Friday-to-Saturday but just did not prove that with a good enough qualifying lap. It is still a first start-to-finish poor weekend for Hadjar to overcome in his first season alongside Verstappen, though.
Verstappen had his own errors, though. Looping it through 360 degrees at Turn 2 while fighting Leclerc, after being mugged by him into the first corner after the start, dropped Verstappen into the pack and he was perhaps fortunate to avoid trouble with some aggressive overtaking as he tried to recover lost ground. He also picked up a five-second penalty of his own for crossing the white line exiting the pits.
All that meant for the first time this season Red Bull had a car capable of getting a better result than either of its drivers delivered.
The RB22 was midfield fodder in China and Japan, which is where Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar ran, but a big suite of upgrades transformed things in Miami and clearly reinstated it in the middle of the lead group.
Alpine’s escaped the midfield
It’s not a new thing to see Alpine leading the way in F1’s midfield in 2026, but the manner in which it did so in Miami was markedly different to what we’ve seen so far.
The big step forward taken by the top teams meant there was a slightly lower, bottom-of-the-top-10 ceiling placed on Alpine’s potential here compared to places such as China and Japan – where Pierre Gasly comfortably outqualified Red Bulls.
But the marginal battles to progress out of Q2 were no longer marginal at all, as the heavily upgraded Alpine – featuring revised nose, brake drums and suspension fairings, as well as an all-new rear wing – pulled three-to-four tenths clear of the likes of Audi and Haas.
Partly that was down to those more potent recent midfield rivals bringing much less to the table in terms of upgrades, but the fact both Alpines were properly competitive is even more telling.
Franco Colapinto made Q3 for the first time this season and finished comfortably the highest-placed midfield runner. He was eighth across the line before Leclerc’s penalty promoted him to seventh, more than 20 seconds clear of the next best midfield car – Carlos Sainz’s heavily updated Williams – and within 8.2 seconds of Hamilton’s Ferrari.
No wonder Colapinto called this his “most perfect” weekend since entering F1.
Overall delight at Alpine will be slightly tempered by Gasly ending his unbroken run of points finishes this year with an upside-down smack into the barriers – on a weekend where he was subdued by what he reckoned was a persistent problem with driveability and wheelspin on his car in particular.
Cadillac’s ‘hidden areas’ of improvement
Cadillac’s first F1 major upgrade led to its strongest performance of the season in the sprint portion of the Miami weekend but it was inconsistent thereafter.
The new package has added aerodynamic load as expected but Cadillac struggled to make the most of that through the weekend. By main qualifying, various changes seemed to have made the car worse for both drivers, as Sergio Perez went from being an outside Q2 threat in the sprint to being miles adrift on Saturday afternoon.
Perez said that a short-term priority now needs to be tyre degradation, as others are just picking up the pace through the stint and leaving Cadillac behind. “We are in a massive hurry to find performance,” he said, because Aston Martin is its immediate rival and Perez expects that team to start making progress soon.
As for Valtteri Bottas, who looked second-best most of this weekend, he felt there are “many hidden areas we are improving” in – the implication being that while the car is being made faster, that is not coming across properly in laptimes. He also suggested the upgrades are an improvement when they work as expected, but some are not being produced to the same quality.
“The main thing is we are seeing progress in many areas,” he insisted.
Williams has car it should’ve started with
Williams brought some 5000 new parts in total to Miami as it aimed to bring upgrades along with its first bout of weight-saving measures.
This amounted to the car – at least in terms of aerodynamic specification – that Williams had intended to start the season with in Australia, but had to delay because of how badly it fell behind in the off-season.
And it worked. Williams was in the mix again, if not super-quick, and was rewarded for its effort with a first double-points finish of 2026 as it took advantage of the chaotic start to the race and some misfortune for others to get both cars in the top 10.
There is still more work to do because the team cannot upgrade the car and strip weight out of it as quickly as it would hope to while doing both at the same time.
But it is at least a step in the right direction.
Jury’s out on rule changes
Mercedes team principal Wolff said anyone who complained about the Miami GP’s racing spectacle should “hide” because, in his view, it would be such an outrageous position to hold.
But that doesn’t mean the rule changes made ahead of this weekend are now vindicated and F1 2026 has suddenly reached perfection.
The energy-rich nature of the Miami circuit – its stop/start layout means there are plentiful opportunities to recharge the battery under conventional braking – means this was always likely to be one of the better showcases for the new regulations, regardless of the more restrictive energy regeneration and deployment limits imposed.
It was clear the cars were being driven more ‘normally’ in Miami, with hardly any extreme lifting and coasting or so-called super clipping, where the MGU-K runs in reverse to charge the battery under full throttle.
But the underlying problems remain; with the current batteries, power units that rely on a near-50/50 split of combustion and electrical power simply cannot propel these F1 cars around current F1 circuits efficiently enough.
Verstappen, perhaps the most vocal critic of 2026 so far, was clearly happier to be driving a more competitive Red Bull in Miami, but he hasn’t changed his view that “it’s still punishing you, the faster you go through corners, the slower you go on the next straight”.
Sainz is another driver who’s been forthright in criticising these regulations publicly. He felt things were “a bit better” in Miami but more information is needed from other, more energy-challenging circuits.