Kimi Antonelli has won the last three Grand Prix, making him the unexpected title challenger and perhaps championship favourite. The twenty-year-old looked to many in Miami to be a more genuine title contender in only his second season, something which I feel is a big challenge given a mixed debut season.
Antonelli
Antonelli appears to be going in as the title contender and maybe the favourite, which is surprising. Still, we do get these once-in-a-generation talents like Max Verstappen, Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso. I think the question could start to shift if this goes into the second half of the season. Can he handle the pressure when we get into where championships are won and lost
Antonelli, I think, has the base to build from, and already grown in confidence as we saw when he came under pressure, with Norris in 2024 and Piastri 2025, they cracked in their first championship challenge. Although his main rival for the championship, George Russell, is also fighting for his first championship, he has a decade’s worth of experience in the sport.
The Italian has spent the April break working on some of those chinks in his armour, like his start difficulties, though a lot of the burden is on Mercedes to simplify its procedures too, with Toto Wolff calling the team’s struggles across both cars “unacceptable” as the competition closes in on Mercedes.
Miami felt as if, barring his bad start in the Grand Prix, like his best weekend of his career, where he held off a resurgent Lando Norris and comprehensively outperformed his more experienced teammate, George Russell. But the Mercedes has an advantage, yes its not as big as we saw in the early part of the hybrid era, they are still a force to be reckoned with.
They also didn’t bring upgrades like many of their rivals; they have them coming for Montreal. The question must be whether they can rebuild the bigger advantage we saw in the opening three races. Mercedes, or Brawn as they were in 2009, have won the championship the year of PU regulation changes in 2009 and 2014, they could do it again, but to me the gap isn’t as big as it has been in previous cycles.
Are McLaren back
McLaren had a difficult start to the season, but after the disaster in Shanghai, could have only dreamed of a double podium in Miami and one in Suzuka. Going into last weekend, as I wrote in the prixview, over the break, there seemed to go with the British “keep calm and carry on” approach that appears to have put them on the path back towards the front.
However, Miami has been a very happy hunting ground for McLaren in recent years, with them going into the weekend having an upgraded car. I think they also began to eat away at Mercedes advantage when it came to understanding deployment modes etc and in the sprint, Mercedes got their deployment strategy wrong in the sprint but then corrected it with a ‘normalise’ set-up for the race.
The weekend was full of strategic errors, as you could argue that Norris lost last weekend’s race by Antonelli successfully under cutting the McLaren. The world champion pitted a lap later, and his stop was fractionally slower than the Mercedes who were able to undercut.
The reason why McLaren went longer than Antonelli was the radar; heavy rain had already moved the start forward three hours, but Norris pitted three laps later, and the rain never came. But this was a strong showing from McLaren, which introduced a major upgrade package this weekend, bringing them right into the fight with Mercedes.
McLaren believes that Mercedes still has the advantage, yes they were closer, but my question is when we get to Montreal, when Mercedes has their upgrades, will that gap increase? These upgrades were all scheduled for Sakhir last month, when we get to Barcelona, where we also had testing six months previously when we get to the weekend, I expect another raft of upgrades.
This year is much about, as we saw between Barcelona and the Sakhir tests, an arms race to develop these cars, and that will continue over this whole cycle. McLaren has over the last four years, been bringing upgrades to the car, and they can do that again.
McLaren isn’t done upgrading either, with sources suggesting its own Montreal package accounts for around 40 per cent of its total car overhaul across both rounds. Watch this space. The turnaround means they were able to win two constructors and last years drivers’ championship, this year maybe a strong fight back to win the title in 2024 and 2025
Regulation Changes
The sport went into the weekend having tweaked the regulations for safety and spectacle of the new-for-2026 regulations, which have received a mix reception since their debut. My impression can be summed by Charles Leclerc, who said after the race, “It’s improved a little bit. The battles in itself, I don’t think, changed massively. In qualifying, some things changed. It was a step in the right direction.”
I never expected the changes, lowering the harvesting limit from eight to seven megajoules in qualifying, to be the ‘magic bullet’, but in my view, the racing was still good, and there were still signs of so-called ‘yo-yo racing’ in Miami, with a battle between Leclerc and eventual race winner Kimi Antonelli earning the moniker from Will Joseph, race engineer for Lando Norris.
I think this style of racing is going to stay, and as the field closes up, but mainly the gap between Mercedes and the likes of McLaren, Ferrari and Red Bull, we could have some great racing. Norris described it as “a small step in the right direction, but it’s not to the level that F1 should still be at yet.”
The focus I feel, has shifted to resolving the biggest issue, the closing speeds, which is a safety issue highlighted by Ollie Bearman’s crash in Suzuka. The lack of changes in this regard made it “incredibly tough” to anticipate the moves of an attacking driver, Piastri added.
But one of the impacts of that is that the cars were about one and a half seconds slower than in 2025, Audi’s Gabriel Bortoleto, meanwhile, said the changes “felt a bit better” in qualifying.
Though we see push back against the style of racing by both drivers and fans, nothing new, I think history tells us from 2009, 2014 and 2022, that you don’t lose viewers based on soley the regulation changes that only come when you have a long period of dominance. I believe, given this is a second regulation change on the aero side in five years and the sixth year of a budget cap, I think it is closer than what we would have seen in the previous cycle.
Ferrari
There appeared to be little for Lewis Hamilton to celebrate, a weekend which could be summed up as ‘wrong place at the wrong time’ when Verstappen spun ahead of him at the start and then suffered aero damage after a glancing blow from Franco Colapinto. The damage to Hamilton is believed to cost him about half a second a lap.
Asked if he had felt beforehand that the performance would be stronger than it proved to be – with Ferrari amongst those to bring an upgrade package to Miami – he added: “I think if the car was in one piece, I felt the car was pretty good on the laps to the grid.
“I felt like we would have been more competitive, so I really felt optimistic for today. I got held up at the beginning when Max spun, and I was in the wrong position for that, and then obviously the damage that I got after that then I was just… I had nothing.”
Charles Leclerc’s last lap spin, which cost him a podium and the following twenty-second penalty for cutting chicanes, dropped him down to eighth in the final results. While he avoided a massive crash, he did clip the wall and lost further positions to George Russell and Max Verstappen.
Leclerc said, “The damage was significant. To tell you exactly what the damage was, I’m not so sure. I’m pretty sure there was a puncture; there was probably some suspension damage as well, as I couldn’t really turn to the right anymore. So yeah, I’m very disappointed with myself. It’s all on me and it’s a mistake.”
These factors suggest to me that we don’t really know where Ferrari are after their upgrades and that of others, the team didn’t maximise the weekend.
Looking ahead
This weekend and month to me feels like an outlier, we won’t have the full picture as I wrote ahead of the weekend until Barcelona, when we will get another raft of upgrades as well as being the next ‘traditional’ weekend. Mercedes, however, will have the Bahrain upgrade in Montreal, so it will be interesting to see how they spin it.
I feel the sport could start to look different when we get into the summer the next raft of upgrades for Barcelona, then after the reset in aero testing between Austria and Silverstone. It feels to me Mercedes the results say have won every race this season, but compared to 2014 or 2009, cracks are there to allow others to close in, but it still feels likely it’s their championship to lose
