The Miami Grand Prix, round 4 of the Formula 1 season, brought with it the first round of major upgrades under the all-new 2026 regulations. It was billed as a mini reset; a second season opener. The unexpected April break had allowed teams to digest the opening three weekends and better target their upgrade rollouts for when the seasons resumed in the United States, giving them a chance to shuffle their position in the pecking order.
While we didn’t see any wholesale changes to the lay of the land, there’s no doubt that the field became considerably tighter, promising closer battles from the next round in Canada.
The development rate metric approximates each team’s development trajectory based on the rate they’re getting closer to Mercedes over a single lap over the first four rounds of the season.
- Alpine: improving by 1.5s seconds
- Cadillac: improving by 1.4 seconds
- Williams: improving by 1.3 seconds
- McLaren: improving by 1.1 seconds
- Red Bull Racing: improving by 0.9 seconds
- Ferrari: improving by 0.6 seconds
- Haas: improving by 0.5 seconds
- Aston Martin: improving by 0.5 seconds
- Audi: improving by 0.5 seconds
- Racing Bulls: improving by 0.2 seconds
- Mercedes: steady
Everyone is closing in on Mercedes — and Mercedes, having been the fastest car at every track, is unchanged.
This is partly because they all started so far off the pace in Melbourne, where Mercedes was clearly the best prepared team in the field. Some of this progress is simply the knowledge gaps being filled in.
To isolate the difference made by the Miami upgrades, the data excludes Melbourne when analysing single-lap performance, treating China and Japan instead as more representative of how the teams started the season.
Even then, though, the improvement for some teams is stark.
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THE CONTENDERS
Mercedes started the season as the clear favourite, but every team insisted — perhaps more out of optimism than belief — that the championship would be won with development, not with the fastest car out of the box.
Gap to fastest, China and Japan
1. Mercedes: fastest
2. McLaren: +0.488 seconds
3. Ferrari: + 0.583 seconds
4. Red Bull Racing: +1.341 seconds
Gap to fastest, Miami
1. Mercedes: fastest
2. McLaren: +0.071 seconds
3. Red Bull Racing: +0.166 seconds
4. Ferrari: +0.345 seconds
McLaren closes the gap, but Mercedes still holds the upper hand
McLaren was clearly the big winner from the Miami upgrade push, closing the gap so significantly that Lando Norris was able to pinch pole for the sprint and lead Oscar Piastri to a one-two finish. Mercedes bounced back in grand prix qualifying and the feature race to leave the round fastest overall, but only just.
McLaren, though, clearly underperformed in the main qualifying session, lapping more slowly than it had on Friday afternoon in sprint quali. Given Norris was close to Andrea Kimi Antonelli on pace in the grand prix — and he probably would have won with a better strategy — we can justifiably argue that there’s little to split the top two teams after Miami.
There are some caveats. McLaren has performed strongly in Miami for the last couple of seasons, and the circuit itself as peculiar on the calendar thanks to the climate, the smooth surface and the layout. It is in any case a sample of only one race.
The bigger asterisk, though, is that Mercedes did not bring many upgrades to Miami, instead holding back for Canada next weekend. The fact it was still quickest ahead of so many heavily updated cars bodes very well for the Silver Arrows when it does eventually bring new parts to the track.
McLaren says it has more new bits of its own for Montreal. Will they be enough to keep up?
At very least we’ve seen that form is as volatile as it has been in previous years even under these new regulations.
Ferrari and Red Bull Racing’s contrasting fortunes
Ferrari left Miami undeniably disappointed. Though it closed the gap a little to Mercedes, its frontrunning rivals all did a better job with ostensibly fewer upgrades, leaving Ferrari fourth in the pecking order. It was the only one of the top four teams that wasn’t in pole contention, and though Charles Leclerc was fighting for a podium until late in the race, it was clear Oscar Piastri had the momentum late with a faster car.
Lewis Hamilton suggested correlation issues between the simulator and the circuit played a role in leading the team astray. There were also some signs of classic Ferrari problems in taking a step forward in Q3 when the team looked in the running for pole in the earlier qualifying segments.
Perhaps some of this is down to not fully understanding the significant upgrade package, with more still to come from a deeper understanding at subsequent rounds.
Red Bull Racing had the opposite experience, with big upgrades rescuing the team from the midfield, where it had been in China and Japan, and putting Max Verstappen in pole contention for the Miami Grand Prix. He would have been a podium contender without the first-lap spin that put him into recovery mode for the rest of the day.
It all amounted to a meaningful shuffle of the frontrunning pack — though Ferrari will be wondering if this is the beginning of a long fade-out or just a blip.
THE MIDFIELDERS
The midfield has been difficult to read this season, with relatively little field spread and unreliability muddying the picture.
Gap to fastest, China and Japan
5. Alpine: +1.303 seconds
6. Audi: +1.598 seconds
7. Haas: +1.636 seconds
8. Racing Bulls: +1.670 seconds
9. Williams: +2.278 seconds
Gap to fastest, Miami
5. Alpine: +0.964 seconds
6. Haas: +1.542 seconds
7. Audi: +1.641 seconds
8. Racing Bulls: +1.701 seconds
9. Williams: +1.742 seconds
Alpine’s big step
Alpine grit its teeth during 2025 hoping that its full devotion to the 2026 regulations — plus its switch to Mercedes customer power — would pay off with a big jump up the field.
The most distant last-place finisher in F1 history is now breaking free of the midfield. In Miami it was roughly as far behind Ferrari as it was ahead of Haas, its next closest challenger.
Both Pierre Gasly and Franco Colapinto, the Argentine in career-best form, qualified inside the top 10 for both the sprint and the grand prix. They were both top-10 sprint finishers, and Colapinto scored points in the grand prix after Gasly’s race ended in the opening laps.
Colapinto finished less than 10 seconds behind the damaged Hamilton and less than 14 seconds behind Verstappen, but he was more than 20 seconds ahead of the next-best midfielder, Williams driver Carlos Sainz.
Several teams will have felt like they were winners from the upgrade shuffle in Miami, but Alpine can convincingly argue that it was the biggest among them as it charts its path forwards.
Williams’s Melbourne-spec car
Williams will have left Miami with mixed emotions.
Sainz and Alex Albon collected the team’s first double points grand prix finish of the season, with ninth and 10th, and demonstrated a considerable improvement in performance, clashing the gap to the front in qualifying by around half a second.
It says it achieved this with what should have been its Australian Grand Prix car — that is, the version of car it expected to be racing from the opening round.
It speaks to how badly managed a pre-season it had that this first-round car has turned up two months late.
The gains have come from a combination of performance upgrades and weight saving. The car was reportedly almost 30 kilograms over the weight limit at launch, which could be costing as much as a second per lap — and that’s without considering the ill effects excess weight can have on car dynamics.
The team says it has a plan to get below the weight limit, but it can only bring lighter parts to the track through the usual performance upgrade process — it doesn’t make financial sense under the cost cap to rebuild the same parts in a lighter configuration when they might be thrown in the bin a race or two later for a faster version.
So the takeaway is positive and negative: positive in that this car, when chiselled down, has the potential to be far more competitive, but negative in that it likely won’t get there for many months, by which time Alpine may have escaped up the road in pace if not in points.
THE TAIL-ENDERS
Cadillac would never have expected to have company at the back of the pack, never mind be in genuine competition to avoid finishing last in qualifying and races, but Aston Martin’s slow start to the season allowed the new American team to get a jump in the early rounds of the campaign.
Gap to fastest, China and Japan
10. Cadillac: +3.672 seconds
11. Aston Martin: + 3.776 seconds
Gap to fastest, Miami
10. Aston Martin: +3.300 seconds
11. Cadillac: +3.457 seconds
Aston Martin fixes one major problem, but others remain
While Aston Martin is struggling with both its Honda power unit and a troubled car, getting to the bottom of its engine vibrations was a key focus of the opening two months. One of the team’s race cars had a layover at Honda’s Japan factory following the Japanese Grand Prix in a bid to understand why the power unit was shaking so badly when bolted onto the chassis when it wasn’t doing the same on the test bench.
In Miami, with various countermeasures in place, the drivers reported that the vibration issue had been solved, and Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll finished season-best 15th and 17th in Sunday’s grand prix, the team’s first double finish of the year in a grand prix.
But now it’s onto the next problem.
It was clear even during testing that the team had significant gearbox issues, this being its first in-house transmission in decades. Alonso described the gearbox as “impossible to drive” in Miami, noting poor shifting, rear locking and losses of sync.
The team’s priority is to fix these mechanical issues before it can think about improving aerodynamic performance. While gains are being made, the road is clearly very long.
Cadillac makes crucial gains
Cadillac’s objective this season is to demonstrate momentum — to demonstrate that it’s capable of improving through the season.
Miami was its first big test, with major upgrades brought to the car in line with other teams. The improvements were modest but clear.
In raw terms the car has found around 0.3 seconds, though the team believes cleaner execution, particularly in sprint qualifying, could have seen Sergio Pérez get Cadillac out of the bottom six for the first time, which would have represented a major achievement.
But the team keep clocking up finishes and keeps finding ways to race the far more established Aston Martin for position. It’s impossible to say where the year will end for Cadillac, but Miami suggested at least that things are moving in the right direction.
