🏁 RACE/TESTING RECAP

The Garage Race: What Every Team Did During the Five-Week Break

Three races, zero points for Red Bull’s chassis, two cancellations, one championship leader who wasn’t born when Fernando Alonso won his first title, and a five-week gap that has functioned as an emergency development sprint for every team on the grid. With Miami now seven days away, here is what we actually know about where each team stands heading into the first race of the post-regulation-change era.

Red Bull: Something Happened at Silverstone

Max Verstappen and Red Bull returned to Silverstone on Thursday for a filming day — the most closely watched shakedown of the break. The RB22 that rolled out bore little resemblance to the car Verstappen drove to 12 points through three rounds. The most visible changes: substantially revised sidepods with a more angular design, new front and rear wing profiles, and — most unusually — a small winglet mounted low on the halo support bar, a position never seen in Formula 1 before.

A filming day officially limits teams to 200 kilometres on demonstration tyres with no performance laps and no setup adjustments. In practice, everyone uses filming days as development validation runs, and Red Bull’s appearance with what social media accounts described as “a revamped RB22” confirms they’ve been working harder on the chassis side during the break than their muted messaging would suggest.

The context: Red Bull’s problem this season has been explicitly a chassis issue, not a power unit issue. The Red Bull Ford Powertrains unit has been praised by engineers across the paddock for its energy deployment characteristics. The RB22’s floor, sidepods, and aerodynamic balance have failed to translate that engine performance into lap time — particularly in slower, high-downforce corners where energy deployment advantages matter less. The weight issues the team has acknowledged compound this. A structural aero rethink, starting from the sidepod design, is exactly the kind of solution that could unlock the underlying power unit advantage.

The halo winglet: The small aerodynamic element fitted to the lower section of the halo support bar is the detail drawing the most attention from technical observers. Wings on the halo are not new — but they typically sit much higher on the structure. A lower-mounted winglet would interact with a completely different part of the airflow: specifically, the turbulent wake generated between the driver’s helmet and the roll hoop inlet. Whether it represents a meaningful aerodynamic gain or a structural/cooling management device remains unclear at filming day speeds. But it’s new, it’s at Miami, and that’s not a coincidence.

The wider picture: Red Bull are not alone in bringing substantial upgrades to Miami. The five-week break created by the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian cancellations — both pulled from the calendar after the outbreak of the Iran war in mid-March — gave every team additional development runway that no one had planned for. For the championship leaders Mercedes, that’s a chance to consolidate. For Red Bull, currently fourth in the Constructors’ Championship with 16 points, it’s a potential lifeline.

Sources: GPFans — Verstappen Silverstone filming day | ESPN — The five-week break explained

🔧 TECH BREAKDOWN

McLaren’s Speed Traces Just Showed Us Exactly What’s Been Wrong — And What Miami Fixes

Data published today by The Race, sourced from McLaren’s internal simulations, has given the clearest technical picture yet of the 2026 problem and what the Miami rule changes will actually do to lap time. It’s the first real numbers anyone has shared publicly. Let’s walk through what it actually means.

The Shape of the Problem

When McLaren compared a 2025 qualifying lap against a 2026 lap as the cars actually ran in Australia, China, and Japan, the speed trace revealed something counterintuitive: the 2026 car was capable of achieving higher peak straightline speeds than its predecessor. The theoretical ceiling is genuinely higher. But the actual speed profile looked nothing like a conventional lap.

On some straights, the car would reach a high peak early — then the speed trace would suddenly plateau or even drop while the driver was still at full throttle. That plateau is the superclip: the moment when the MGU-K, running in reverse against the combustion engine to charge the battery, acts as a drag device. The driver is flat, the engine is screaming, and the car is decelerating relative to where its speed profile should be. In the worst cases, the effect is worth nearly half a second per lap just on straights. For a sport where hundredths separate grid positions, that’s an absurdity.

Why Ripping It Off Fast Is Better Than Peeling It Slowly

The core fix is raising the peak harvest rate from 250kW to 350kW. This sounds like making the problem worse — more electrical harvesting means more drag, right? Not exactly. Think of it like charging a phone: a slow charger fills it gradually but ties it up for longer; a fast charger fills it quickly and gives it back sooner.

By harvesting at 350kW instead of 250kW, the superclip window closes faster. The battery fills. The MGU-K snaps back into deployment mode. The weird flat section of the speed trace gets shorter. Combined with the reduction in mandatory energy recovery per lap (from 8MJ to 7MJ), the car spends meaningfully more of each qualifying lap near full deployment, and the speed trace starts to look, if not identical to a 2025 car, at least comprehensible.

The cost: The FIA’s Nikolas Tombazis was explicit that “these changes are not revolutionary” and will make the cars “slightly slower” at the outer limits. The fastest theoretical lap time gets a little longer, because the most extreme superclipping tactics — which teams were using to build up a battery reserve for a mega-deployment at the end of a lap — are now constrained. What you lose in the absolute maximum, you gain in the consistent average. Tombazis confirmed that “qualifying will be more flat out for the drivers” — which is precisely what drivers and fans alike have been demanding since Melbourne.

The Race Implications: Boost Cap Is the Biggest Safety Change

In race conditions, Boost mode is now capped at +150kW above the car’s current power level at activation. This directly addresses the Bearman-Colapinto Japan incident: the moment when the MGU-K energy available to an attacking car created a closing speed that gave the defending car no reaction time. The new cap means the differential between a fresh-battery attacker and a deployed-battery defender narrows substantially in the zones where it’s most dangerous.

Additionally, deployment in corners is now limited to 250kW (rather than the full 350kW available on straights). This addresses the traction-and-torque issues drivers have flagged in low-speed corners, where the car’s electrical output was creating unpredictable behaviour mid-corner. The car becomes more drivable, more predictable, and — in theory — more fun to race.

Sources: The Race — McLaren speed trace data (April 24) | RacingNews365 — Full FIA regulation changes

📊 THE BUSINESS OF SPEED

McLaren’s Nuclear Option, FP1 Goes to 90 Minutes, and the Upgrade Arms Race That Will Define Miami

Andrea Stella’s “Completely New Car” Bet

McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella held a media day at the team’s Woking headquarters this week and said something that would have sounded delusional in March but now sounds like a credible competitive threat: across the Miami and Canadian Grands Prix, they will run “an entirely new MCL40.” Not an upgrade package. Not significant updates. An entirely new car, from an aerodynamic standpoint.

“In our intent, there was always the idea to deliver a completely new car — especially from an aerodynamic upgrades point of view — for the North American races,” Stella said. “I could say overall that, across Miami and Canada, we will see an entirely new MCL40.”

The business calculation here is straightforward. McLaren entered 2026 on the back foot for a specific and identifiable reason: they were drawn into a Championship battle that ran to the last race of 2025, which meant their resources were split between competing and developing the new car longer than any other front-runner. Add to that the challenge of being a customer team adopting a completely new Mercedes power unit — one which their engineers understand less deeply than the works team does — and McLaren’s third-place standing entering Miami (46 points, 89 behind Mercedes) actually understates how much they learned over the break.

Stella’s caveat was the most interesting line: “I would like to stress that this is what I would expect of most of our competitors, so [it is] not necessarily going to be a shift in the pecking order. It will be effectively just a check who has been able to add more performance within the same time frame.” In other words: everyone is bringing new cars to Miami. McLaren is betting they’ve found more performance per development hour than the teams ahead of them.

FP1 Gets 90 Minutes — Because the Rules Changed Mid-Season

The FIA confirmed this week that the sole practice session at the Miami Grand Prix — scheduled for May 1, the opening day of the sprint-format weekend — will be extended from the standard 60 minutes to 90 minutes. The explicit reason: the regulation changes being introduced at Miami are significant enough that teams need additional data-gathering time to understand how their cars behave under the new energy management parameters before Qualifying.

This is, if you think about it, an extraordinary admission by F1’s governing body. Mid-season rule changes are rare. Mid-season rule changes significant enough to require extending the only practice session are almost without precedent. The FIA is essentially acknowledging that teams will show up to Miami not entirely certain how their upgraded cars will behave under the new rules — even after five weeks of development. The 30-minute extension gives them a slightly larger margin for error before Saturday’s Sprint Qualifying.

Miami FP1 now runs 1200–1330 local time on Friday, May 1. Sprint Qualifying follows at 1600–1700. The Grand Prix itself is Sunday, May 3.

Sources: Formula1.com — Stella on McLaren’s new car | Formula1.com — FP1 extended to 90 minutes

🗣️ HOT TAKES

Five Opinions Heading Into Miami

1. Red Bull’s Silverstone package is do-or-die territory. A filming day with brand-new sidepods and a halo winglet that’s never been seen before isn’t refinement. That’s a reset. Red Bull have 16 points. Their reigning World Drivers’ Champion is ninth in the standings. The power unit is not the problem. If this chassis revision doesn’t deliver a step change at Miami, there will be serious questions about whether the RB22 is fundamentally fixable — and whether Verstappen’s Miami attendance clause in his exit options gets used.

2. McLaren winning the upgrade arms race would be the most McLaren thing that could happen. Start the season underdeveloped. Lose your race engineer to your closest rival. Watch your title sponsor (Mastercard) squirm through three rounds of irrelevance. Then arrive at Miami with an entirely new car and eat everyone’s lunch. They’ve done it before. The 2023 season was built on exactly this trajectory. If Norris and Piastri are in the mix at Miami, the championship conversation changes completely.

3. The FP1 extension is a bigger deal than anyone is treating it. The FIA doesn’t extend practice sessions because they want to. They extend them because the alternative — teams arriving at Qualifying without understanding their cars — is worse. Miami is a sprint weekend. There is no FP2. If a team gets their energy calibration wrong in the 90-minute session, they’re going into Sprint Qualifying essentially blind. The 2026 rule changes are more consequential than the official messaging suggests.

4. Antonelli leads the championship and half the paddock still treats it as an accident. He has won two races from pole in three attempts. He set the fastest lap in Japan. He’s 19 years old and is handling the title pressure with the composure of someone who’s been doing this for a decade. His Senna comparisons make Toto Wolff visibly uncomfortable, which means the people closest to the situation genuinely believe the ceiling here is extraordinary. Stop treating this like a fluke.

5. The five-week forced break might accidentally save the 2026 season. Without the Iran war cancellations, teams would have raced in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia under regulations that drivers hated, fans were confused by, and the FIA knew needed fixing. Instead, everyone got five weeks to develop better cars, the FIA got the political space to confirm rule changes, and Miami becomes a genuine reset moment. Nobody would have designed it this way. It might work out anyway.

🏢 PADDOCK INSIDER

Jos Verstappen’s One Word, Max’s Exit Clock & What “Longer Than People Say” Actually Means

Spend enough time watching Formula 1’s internal politics and you learn that the most informative comments are the ones delivered casually, as if they don’t matter. Jos Verstappen gave one of those this week when asked about Gianpiero Lambiase’s confirmed departure from Red Bull to join McLaren as Chief Racing Officer by 2028. His explanation for what drove Lambiase out? One word: “Money.”

That framing matters because it’s the most benign possible reading of what’s happened at Red Bull this year. If Lambiase — the engineer who spent over a decade as Max Verstappen’s closest technical partner, the man on the other end of the radio through four World Championships — left purely for a better offer from McLaren, that’s a talent market story. Teams with more money poach the best people. Normal business. If Lambiase left for money AND because the internal environment at Red Bull had become genuinely dysfunctional after the Horner investigation fallout and Adrian Newey’s exit, that’s a different story entirely. The people who know which version is true are not speaking publicly.

Norris’ comment carries more weight than a teammate defending another driver typically would. He knows Verstappen well enough to read the situation. His read — that Max will stay in F1 longer than the departure narrative suggests — is consistent with what Red Bull’s Christian Horner has been saying publicly, and with the fact that Verstappen is actively developing the RB22 with filming days at Silverstone rather than quietly disengaging. Drivers who are truly checked out don’t go to Silverstone on a Thursday to run untested bodywork. They go to the Nurburgring on a Sunday and build a half-minute lead before a splitter falls off.

Oscar Piastri was characteristically precise about the Verstappen situation when asked separately: “It would be a shame” if Max left in his prime. Not a passionate plea. Not a campaign. Just a factual statement of what the sport would be losing. And Piastri’s calibration on things like this tends to be more accurate than the louder voices.

What the paddock is watching for at Miami: whether Verstappen’s energy in the paddock feels engaged or performative. At Suzuka, people noticed he was quieter than usual before the race. In a season where his car is genuinely giving him nothing to work with and his closest technical ally has announced his departure, the psychological distance between Max Verstappen and the sport he’s dominated for four years has never been wider. A competitive car in Miami doesn’t just fix Red Bull’s points tally. It potentially fixes the sport’s biggest retention problem.

Sources: PlanetF1 — Jos Verstappen on Lambiase | Reuters — Norris on Verstappen’s future | Gulf News — Piastri on Verstappen

📸 OFF THE GRID

History Made, Miami Fashion Week & The “Pocket Rocket” Who Just Changed Everything

👔 Doriane Pin Just Made History — And She’s Not Done

On April 18, 22-year-old Doriane Pin became the first woman to test a Mercedes Formula 1 car, and the first woman to drive an F1 car since Aston Martin’s Jessica Hawkins in 2023. The 2025 F1 Academy champion — nicknamed the “Pocket Rocket” and once told she was too small to drive a go-kart — completed 76 laps of the Silverstone National Circuit in Mercedes’ 2021 W12, covering 124 miles in total. Her fastest lap came at the very end of the day.

“Unbelievable,” is how she described it. “It’s a big day, a historic day. I was able to show (people) that no matter the gender and no matter the path you took before, you can drive a Formula 1 car.” She grew up watching Vettel win championships on television in Val-de-Marne, outside Paris. Budget concerns nearly ended her career before the Iron Dames sportscar team gave her a way back. Mercedes and F1 Academy followed. And now she has 76 laps in an actual F1 car on her résumé — and a quote that reads like a mission statement: “It makes more sense now to say (racing in F1) is a goal and it’s something I want to reach.”

The paddock’s reaction has been overwhelmingly warm. This is the kind of moment F1 desperately needs — not just for representation, but for the sport’s credibility with the young, female audience it’s spent three years telling brands it can reach. Doriane Pin is the real version of that story. She’s fast, she’s committed, and she just proved to herself she belongs.

📸 Miami Fashion Drops: Tommy, Adidas, and the New F1 Woman

Tommy Hilfiger x Cadillac F1: The collection dropped online April 22 and lands at Tommy Hilfiger’s Dolphin Mall and Sawgrass Mills stores ahead of a race weekend activation April 30–May 2. This is the first meaningful fashion moment for Cadillac as an F1 team, and it’s smart positioning. Tommy Hilfiger’s aesthetic — preppy, nautical, all-American — maps onto the Miami GP’s Hard Rock Stadium energy better than almost any other racing team-brand pairing on the grid. The collection features the Cadillac chassis navy alongside Hilfiger’s signature red-white-blue palette. Worth watching: who wears it in the paddock and who gets tagged in the Instagram posts.

Adidas x Audi F1: The first of a planned series of race weekend capsule collections from Adidas and Audi F1 landed this week, timed for Miami. The collection sits at the intersection of football (soccer) and motorsport — which makes sense given Audi’s German roots and Adidas’ global footprint. WWD reported it features both lifestyle and performance pieces. Gabriel Bortoleto, Audi’s Brazilian driver who has been a quiet points surprise in 2026, has the brand energy to carry this kind of collaboration well. Watch his social media over the Miami weekend.

F1’s Off-Season Collection: Formula 1 itself launched a new lifestyle collection this week, featuring a women’s sleeveless twist top with sculptural detailing and F1 logo embroidery, a cropped track jacket with corset waist and lacing, matching low-rise track shorts, and a relaxed racer jersey. The unisex side includes an oversized graphic tee and a printed square scarf designed for multiple styling options. It’s the sport’s latest attempt to compete in the lifestyle fashion space rather than just license its logo to team gear. Given the audience that shows up at Miami every year — more fashion-forward than almost any other race on the calendar — the timing is right.

✈️ Driver Watch: The Break Edition

The five-week gap has been relatively quiet on the driver social front compared to a normal race break — most of the paddock appears to be in full work mode ahead of Miami. Kimi Antonelli, who leads the championship for the first time in his career at 19, has kept his social footprint characteristically minimal during the break. Charles Leclerc, meanwhile, has been the most visible: his Monte Carlo base gives him better access to the Monaco-level social scene that tends to generate paparazzi content. No confirmed relationship or personal life news to report from the break period, though Miami weekend traditionally produces the season’s most vibrant off-track content — expect the paddock social scene to come alive from May 1.

Sources: The Athletic — Doriane Pin Mercedes test | Modern Luxury — Tommy Hilfiger x Cadillac | WWD — Adidas x Audi | TicketNews — F1 Off-Season Collection

👀 WHAT TO WATCH

Seven Days to Miami: Everything That Matters From May 1

Miami Grand Prix, May 1–3 (Hard Rock Stadium, Florida): F1 returns to Hard Rock Stadium for a sprint weekend — the format that gives teams one 90-minute practice session before the competitive action begins. This is already the most consequential race of the 2026 season: first test of the new energy management rules, first competitive outing for most teams’ upgraded cars, and the first chance for anyone other than Mercedes to win since the season opener in Melbourne.

Five Things to Watch at Miami:

• Does the superclip visibly disappear? The most immediate test of whether the regulation changes worked is the speed profile on the main straight. If cars are maintaining speed through the entire straight rather than plateauing mid-run, the fix is working. Watch the onboard cameras from lap 1 of Sprint Qualifying.
• Red Bull’s Silverstone package in competition: The new sidepod design and front/rear wings haven’t been tested in race conditions. Miami’s combination of medium-speed corners and straight sections is a reasonable test for what Red Bull has been trying to fix. If Verstappen qualifies inside the top five, the RB22 is genuinely competitive. If he’s P11 or worse, the problem is deeper than the packaging.
• McLaren’s “new car” benchmark: Stella said it himself — the upgrade arms race means everyone arrives with substantial new parts. The question is who found more performance per development hour. McLaren were genuinely quick in Japan before Piastri was edged out for the win. A fully upgraded MCL40 with a better understanding of the Mercedes power unit could be the car that ends Mercedes’ winning run.
• Verstappen’s body language: Sounds soft, but it’s real. Max is either re-engaged and wanting to fight, or he’s going through the motions while monitoring his exit options. The Silverstone filming day suggests the former. Miami will tell us which version shows up.
• Doriane Pin watch: Mercedes have invested in Pin’s development publicly. Whether she appears at Miami in any capacity — hospitality, media, or otherwise — would signal the next step in a program that made history last week. This is one to track.

Championship Standings (after 3 of 22 rounds):
Drivers: Antonelli (Mercedes) 72 | Russell (Mercedes) 63 | Leclerc (Ferrari) 49 | Hamilton (Ferrari) 41 | Norris (McLaren) 25 | Bearman (Haas) 17 | Verstappen (Red Bull) 12
Constructors: Mercedes 135 | Ferrari 90 | McLaren 46 | Haas 18 | Red Bull 16

Miami is in seven days. After five weeks of waiting, something is finally about to happen. Stay on the racing line.