I think that we all expected Mercedes to be the frontrunner and that has played out. George Russell was utterly dominant in Melbourne but I have to say that Kimi Antonelli’s performance in China was mighty impressive. There were times last year where the Italian looked a bit shaky but in Shanghai, especially in the second stint, he did an outstanding job. George looked a little bit quicker in that first phase of the race but once they switched to the harder tyre, Kimi just eased away from him and demonstrated that he has made a good step forward from last year. It will be really interesting to see if he gets a big confidence boost from this win and whether he can find the consistency that he lacked last season to put together a championship campaign against George. The early indications for 2026 are that this could be an intra-Mercedes battle for the title.
Ferrari has come out of the blocks strong and most certainly it is the second- best team right now – a clear step ahead of both McLaren and Red Bull, who had a particularly tough time in Shanghai. Ferrari’s decision to go with the smaller turbo has created a lot of the action in the early part of the race, but more importantly I think when we get to tracks without big, long straights it could be competitive against even Mercedes. We all know how good both Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton are in Monaco so watch out for them there.
On the subject of the racing itself, I somewhat agree with Verstappen’s comments after China because a large part of the overtaking and duelling has been as a result of Ferrari getting great starts and fighting the Mercedes drivers early on in a high-speed chess match of energy-management strategy. I get what Max is saying, that we are not seeing pure overtaking moves where drivers are trying to outbrake each other into corners like we have become used to over the last several years, but there is absolutely no doubt that the racing we have seen so far has been very entertaining. I watched the first two races from home as I had some family commitments and we all thoroughly enjoyed the drama – and we sat on the edge of the sofa watching the Ferraris and Mercedes battle in the Chinese Grand Prix.
If we rewind the clock to the 1980s and the days of turbo boost pressure and fuel management we often saw races where the overtaking moves were determined by whether a driver had turned up or down the boost pressure. In some regard this is the same sort of principle but with a different type of energy: electrical.
We saw some great fighting in the midfield and to be honest, if we can get a situation where McLaren and Red Bull can get more competitive and, along with Ferrari, get closer to Mercedes, then the racing could be fantastic to watch. It might take half a season but there are some very clever engineers in that paddock who will be working hard to unlock performance.