Sprint Miami: McLaren leads a compact group, Ferrari fights without horses

McLaren confirms the enormous overall step Lando Norris dominates the Miami Sprint Race, but driving a Formula 1 that now seems to have good conditions to be interesting. McLaren does a double and it undoubtedly does so on merit: the updated car is excellent, it has much more load than before, it has excellent performance in fast speeds and is also very fast in slow speeds, for now it seems to give up something in top speed, but to unload all the power of the Mercedes engine in traction onto the asphalt. In practice the weak points are few and with the heat and these more complicated conditions from the point of view of tire management Norris’ best natural characteristic emerges, which – if he has to make pace and meanwhile keep everything in the ideal window – becomes difficult for anyone to beat. But the group is more compact than ever. The group, however, is more compact than we have ever seen this year. The Mercedes had a good pace but should be considered at most equal to the leaders, certainly not better. Antonelli’s bad start took away any hope for the Italian driver and the Brackley team in general to recover as there wasn’t much more to squeeze out of the car. Antonelli’s frustration mistake was a bad one with the track limit at the end of the race which gave free points to Russell and the rest of the competition, which also no longer seems limited to the internal team component for the title. Second force on the track was actually Ferrari (with Leclerc better than Hamilton, even if the Englishman had a good start to the race). The updated SF-26 continues to show excellent performance in fast and slow speeds, a good front end (even exiting turn 16 where the reds have historically suffered in recent years). The main deficiency continues to be power and the Power Unit in general. We saw live, and you can clearly see from the graph of the average telemetry of the race, how Leclerc and Hamilton were forced into a very marked energy harvesting phase in the first sector, towards turn 4. It is clear that the need arose from the fact that otherwise the reds would not have had enough energy for the next two straights, but due to this significant loss of time (2-3 tenths per lap) Leclerc continued to accumulate a gap from Piastri, also losing the possibility of attacking him in the overtaking points. The frustration of the driver is clear from Leclerc’s gestures in the car, as on more than one occasion he raised at least one hand from the steering wheel in the first sector, even placing it in the center of it, giving the idea of ​​not being able to really push at that moment and having to see his opponent move away in front. However, the sensations on the updates continue to be positive with good tire management, even in hot conditions, a high load level and a good mechanical setup. We’ll see if, between the next qualifying and possibly the wet race, some interesting possibilities will open up for the Maranello team. Max like in ’22, and new rules ok, with the help of the track Coming to Red Bull we can’t help but notice a good step forward from Verstappen (and one back from Hadjar compared to his teammate). The impression is that the car from Milton Keynes has much less load than the competition, but that it now has a good overall balance and this helps its Dutch champion enormously: Verstappen manages to keep the car at the performance limit by squeezing the most out of the tires even while driving single-seaters with less downforce, a bit like he did with great skill in the first part of the 2022 season. Finally, the new rules applied by Miami seem to work well, with a decidedly more linear race and a qualifying that was absolutely pleasant. The impression is that there is an important component of help that also comes from the layout of the track, with the straights interspersed with large braking points that allow you to recover a huge amount of energy already in those phases, but the possibility of attacking under braking and driving more at the limit is evident and is certainly a positive evolution. The closeness of the values ​​on the track, then, can really ignite the season. We’ll see what results we get from the next qualifying session, because making predictions has suddenly become very difficult.

Automobile Magazine – F1 English News
2026-05-03 04:00:00