Mercedes flies in qualifying
There Mercedes it clearly is the team to beat in this very first glimpse of 2026. But if in the race, between the sprint at the start and the ‘battery’ overtaking, Ferrari seems to be able to keep up with it in the first lapsthere seems to be no story in qualifyingas Russell and Antonelli don’t seem to struggle at all in securing the front row.
And so it also happened in Shanghai, where the two Silver Arrows put themselves ahead of everyone both in the Sprint Qualifying on Friday and in the Qualifying on Saturday.
Is there a Mercedes Party Mode?
Our Federico Albano he had explained it from the pages of after Australia: Mercedes could exploit a sort of qualifying Electric ‘Party Mode’i.e. a particularly effective mapping in terms of delivery on one single lap.
The intuition seems to have been correct, since it was confirmed by Lewis Hamilton after the China Sprint: “I have been at Mercedes for a long time and I know how it works there. In qualifying they have another mode they can use, similar to the Party Mode of old. Once they get to Q2 they activate it, while we don’t have it. In the race they don’t have that mode. But it is clear that they have something more to exploit from Q2, because in Q1 we are not that far away and then they make a big leap. From one tenth behind they suddenly go to seven tenths ahead.”
The theme of the most intense qualifying mode remained in Hamilton’s mind even after qualifying, where he finished third, three and a half tenths behind Antonelli: “Understanding the real detachment is not easy, because perhaps they have not activated that particular mode that they have. I do not know. We will take this gap with a pinch of salt.”
TO Lando Norris McLaren was asked about the existence of this Party Mode and whether his team can exploit it in qualifying: “No, we don’t have it. I don’t know if Mercedes has it.”
