Cadillac driver Sergio Perez of Mexico steers his car during a qualifying session for the Miami Formula One Grand Prix auto race, Saturday, May 2, 2026, in Miami Gardens, Fla. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)

MIAMI — With an unexpected five-week break in the beginning of the season, the 11 Formula 1 (F1) teams worked feverishly on developing their cars. Each team was hoping to make improvements, whether it was a back marker team trying to get to the midfield, a midfield team trying to compete for points, or one of the front runners trying to improve their odds of winning a race.

As Mercedes has won all three feature races and the one sprint race so far, they were literally the team to beat as everyone arrived in Miami for another sprint race weekend. Interestingly, they were one of four teams that didn’t bring any significant updates for their car.

Aston Martin, mired in the back of the field with loads of problems from their Honda-manufactured power unit, didn’t bring a single updated piece of machinery for their car. Haas only had one update, while Audi and Mercedes had two updates. Racing Bulls and Alpine had six, Williams and Red Bull had seven, Cadillac surprised many as F1’s newest team by bringing nine updates, and Ferrari had a whopping 11 updates to their cars.

So, the questions going into the weekend included: Will the new technical regulation updates improve racing? Will Mercedes regret not bringing more significant updates to their cars? Will the updates for the other teams actually work and improve their performance? Will weather play a factor in the feature race on Sunday?

Starting with the regulation tweaks, teams were allowed a ninety-minute practice session on Friday morning, extended from the typical 60-minutes to make sure the teams had adapted their cars appropriately. The updates are all very technical, but in short, they are intended to stop the extreme difference in speeds that saw Oliver Bearman have a dangerous crash in Japan, and stop the harvesting on long straights so cars don’t slow down on the fastest parts of the race tracks.

On the whole, practice suggested the updates to the regulations were positive to performance. Qualifying showed the cars were just over a second slower than the times from last season which was a vast improvement from earlier rounds. Most importantly, the races showed the cars could still stay close to one another, could keep up top speeds down straights, and that the racing was still exciting to watch.

As for Mercedes, they were probably pretty nervous as the weekend opened up. The fastest times went to Charles Leclerc in his Ferrari, Max Verstappen in his Red Bull, Oscar Piastri in his McLaren, Lewis Hamilton in his Ferrari, and then finally Kimi Antonelli and George Russell in their Mercedes cars. While they had dominated every session coming to Miami, it looked like they were caught once more.

Qualifying for the Sprint race showed mixed results as Antonelli was able to get second place on the grid, but Russell could only manage sixth. The sprint race didn’t fare much better for them as Antonelli was penalized and dropped to sixth while Russell could only work his way up to fourth.

Meanwhile, the McLaren cars looked reborn as Norris cruised to a win in the sprint race, nearly four seconds ahead of his teammate Piastri in second. Leclerc drove his Ferrari to third place and Verstappen was significantly happier, getting his Red Bull up to fifth and looking very competitive.

Saturday afternoon, the cars took the track once more for feature race qualifying, and strangely the results were very different than in sprint qualifying. Since the two qualifying sessions happen around the same time on Friday and Saturday, one typically expects very similar results. Antonelli nabbed pole position, Verstappen was in second, Leclerc in third, Norris in fourth, Russell in fifth, Hamilton in six, and Piastri in seventh.

As a viewer, this was really exciting to see as the predictability of Mercedes dominance shown in the first three rounds was thrown out the window and now, with these current updates, there were four teams with a legitimate shot at pole position.

The opening six laps of the race were extraordinarily chaotic in some exciting ways. While Mercedes qualified at the front and won all the races before Miami, they had to work for it because their starts were terrible. When the lights went out, the tortoise and the hare parable came to life as the Mercedes cars of Antonelli and Russell were passed by the Ferrari and McLaren cars continually.

This actually happened again in the sprint race as Antonelli was demoted several places when the lights extinguished. As the feature race got underway, Antonelli has his best start of the season, losing only two places. Leclerc jumped ahead of both Antonelli and Verstappen, but then braked early as he turned into turn one. Verstappen and Antonelli both seemed caught out and locked their front tires, going deep into the corner.

Antonelli went off track, rejoining safely but behind Leclerc. Verstappen managed to keep his car on track at first, but had a lot of rear wheel spin in the next corner and spun his car 360 degrees. Amazingly, no other cars hit him and he was able to continue forward with minimal loss of positions.

On lap 6, Isack Hadjar, who had started in the pit lane, made a nice pass before clipping a barrier and crashing into a wall a little further down track, unable to turn with his broken suspension. There was no one else involved, he just misjudged how he was turning in and was trying to get through the field too quickly.

Some 30 seconds later and a little way down the track, Liam Lawson had a gearbox issue manifest in his Racing Bulls car at one of the worst times as Pierre Gasly, in his Alpine, was passing Lawson on the outside of a corner. Unable to brake appropriately in his car, Lawson smashed into Gasly, sending his car through a lateral flip before its back wheel became lodged on top of the safety barriers lining the track.

Between the two incidents, a safety car was necessary. Verstappen was the only front runner to take the quicker pit stop, and also wanted to get rid of his flat spotted tires because of the earlier spin he had. Emerging on new hard tires, he made his way through the field pretty effectively. But questions lingered if his tires would last all the way to the end of the race and if the forecasted rain would change the race.

The rain never materialized. Organizers were so worried about a deluge of rain and a thunderstorm, they actually moved the start time for the race up by three hours to 1 p.m. Eastern after qualifying on Saturday. Still, some teams, like McLaren, were convinced the rain would come and waited for the rain to pit their cars. Other teams like Mercedes and Ferrari told their drivers to come in earlier, and they benefited from that decision.

Norris was able to pass Leclerc pretty early in the race and kept that lead through lap 27. When he came in and put on his new tires, he came out of the pits behind Antonelli and new race leader Verstappen. Both Norris and Antonelli made short work of Verstappen on his old tires, and he spent the rest of the race on those slower tires, trying to minimize his lost positions.

Noris stayed pretty close to Antonelli as the laps ticked by, but the young Italian kept the lead until the checkered flag, winning his third race in a row. He became the first driver in F1 history to win his first three races from pole position and all back-to-back. If he is able to keep his performance at this level, it looks like he’ll be rewriting an awful lot of the record books.

While Norris was happy with the improvement in performance compared to his first three races of the season, he felt they lost the race with their pit stop strategy. Piastri was able to make his way to third position by passing Leclerc on the penultimate lap. Leclerc actually spun soon after the pass, unrelated to Piastri’s driving, and tapped the wall.

Damage to Leclerc’s front tire from that contact made it hard for him to turn his car to the right, and he was barely able to limp across the finish line. Before he could, both Russell and Verstappen passed him in the final corner. Verstappen was given a five-second penalty after the race for going over the white line on the pit exit which would’ve given Leclerc one spot back and minimized the drama for him. Unfortunately, more drama was what he got as the stewards gave Leclerc a 20-second penalty for leaving the track multiple times in the last lap.

This fourth race showed what F1 can look like when changes are made correctly, both by the governing body of F1 and by the teams developing their cars. The field has tightened dramatically with four teams now competing at the front, and other teams making their way forward as well.

Hopefully more of this close racing will continue as the remaining eighteen races get underway. Antonelli, the youngest driver to ever lead the driver’s championship, continues to impress but Mercedes didn’t dominate the weekend this time. Find out who challenges them next in Montreal, Canada, on Sunday, May 24, at 4 p.m. Eastern.