Mark Hughes: Miami's F1 team-mate divide - why driver pace made the difference

Miami was a vivid kaleidoscope of competitive order as McLaren, Ferrari and Red Bull all brought their heavily updated cars and the previously dominant Mercedes stayed with what it had. All three of those upgrade packages added performance – to the extent where it wasn’t even certain Mercedes was still the fastest car. Yet Kimi Antonelli won regardless, his third successive victory from his third successive pole.

The waters were muddied by the scorching Miami track temperatures on Friday and Saturday, such that keeping the rubber from overheating was probably a bigger differentiating difference between the top cars than their aero or power units. McLaren initially seemed to have the best handle on that and Lando Norris breezed to a comfortable sprint pole on Friday and a dominant sprint win on Saturday, with team-mate Oscar Piastri following him distantly across the line, but with his hands full holding off Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari.

Mercedes hadn’t initially perfected its deployment map. Which was a tricky thing around here, which we’ll come to in a moment.

But later that day in grand prix qualifying, the track yet hotter, the wind stronger, the pattern changed again. Antonelli’s pole margin was a handy 0.166sec – and it was over Max Verstappen’s Red Bull. The best McLaren – Norris again – was only fourth-fastest, behind Leclerc.

How come the sudden swing against McLaren of over 0.6sec? This brings us to a new nuance of the big ’26 batteries. There is a crucial relationship between wind strength/direction and battery deployment. Variations in that wind can fundamentally change what the optimum deployment is. It was this which played a major part in McLaren losing its sprint superiority to Mercedes in GP qualifying.

The sequence of interconnected 150-165mph corners of Turns 4-6 was very much key to the whole energy equation around this track. This was where you could back off to charge your battery more fully, ready for the long flat-out section between Turns 8-11. Or you could attack those corners and run out of battery earlier on the straight. There wasn’t a definitive right answer in qualifying. McLaren tweaked its deployment map between the sprint and GP qualifying, attempting to eke out a little more, sacrificing through Turns 4-6 more than it had during sprint qualifying, believing the longer deployment on the straight would bring the lap time down further. But the increased wind – which was a strong headwind into Turns 4-6 – made that the wrong move. There was so much lap time to be found from the extra grip into that headwind there that you were better off attacking those turns – like Mercedes had already been doing but was now doing even more. So suddenly Norris was qualifying 0.314sec slower than the day before – and Antonelli was lapping 0.293sec faster (that 0.6sec swing).

“There is a level of sensitivity to the behaviour of the power unit we are not used to, probably ever, in the history of F1,” explained McLaren’s Andrea Stella.

So it wasn’t always faster to back off in the corners – and in this the regulation tweaks regarding the lower deployment (250kW instead of 350) did have a small positive effect. That and the wind. But Norris for one didn’t believe it to be enough. “If you go flat out everywhere,” he said, “and you try pushing like you were in previous years, you still just get penalised for it. You still can’t be flat out everywhere. It’s not about being as early as possible on throttle everywhere. You should never get penalised for that kind of thing and you still do. So honestly, I don’t really think you can fix that. You just have to get rid of the battery.”

That trade-off between Turns 4-6 and the straight between T8-11 structured most of the significant passing moves in the race too. Also, between the final turn and Turn 1, there was a similar pass/repass scenario to that seen at Suzuka. But the track layout lent itself to a less outrageous offset in speeds before the braking areas than Melbourne. Not as authentic as Shanghai perhaps, but many of the passes were straight out-braking moves.

So we had what looked like a great motor race which was, in fact, not a bad one. Not quite as real as it looked, but one where driver skill and team strategy were the decisive factors in victory. Antonelli lost out at the start again but wasn’t punished too hard this time, thanks in part to Verstappen spinning 360 degrees through Turn 2 as he tried to go wheel-to-wheel with Leclerc (who’d again vaulted the Ferrari into the lead from row 2) allowing Antonelli to run second ahead of Norris.

As Antonelli launched an attack on Leclerc on the sixth lap, he made himself vulnerable with his energy deployment to Norris and in trying to take the lead he was bundled down to third. Once they got going again after a lengthy safety car – for a Hadjar collision with the barriers followed a few seconds later by Gasly flipping after contact with Lawson – Leclerc/Norris/Antonelli pulled out a significant gap over the Piastri/Russell/Hamilton group.

Hamilton’s car was significantly damaged from a first lap scrape with Franco Colapinto’s Alpine so his quiet race to seventh wasn’t representative but he’d trailed Leclerc in pace all weekend, just as Piastri had trailed Norris and just as Russell had trailed Antonelli. There was a much more defined differential than usual between the drivers on each of the leading teams this weekend, a bigger difference, in fact, than between the cars.

Which was an interesting phenomenon – and only in the McLaren drivers’ case was it tangentially to do with deployment algorithms. In the main these differences were about how the respective drivers adapted to the hot, low-grip Miami surface. At McLaren Norris’s way of getting the early corner rotation with his beautifully-judged combined lateral and braking technique was buying him battery savings over Piastri who needed to use more throttle with his more conventional style.

At Mercedes Antonelli’s beautiful dissection of the track, with his millimetre shaving of the walls and kerbs of the corner entries was combined with the sort of feel that George Russell just could not conjure. “When the tarmac is hot, like in Brazil, Kimi was again more competitive than me. I prefer the high-grip conditions where the car is more connected to the ground,” said a resigned Russell. “I just want to get through this weekend really.”

At Ferrari Leclerc’s knife-edge balancing on the high wire, tyre sidewalls brushing the walls, was something Hamilton did not have the confidence to compete with. So the team-mate gaps were big (see below):

These performance gaps played out in the race too and while there were these whole chunks between team-mates, there was far less between the McLaren, Mercedes, Ferrari and even the Red Bull. In fact it couldn’t even be called which was the fastest car; it was either the Mercedes or the McLaren. The Ferrari couldn’t quite keep its tyres from overheating long enough. The Red Bull worked well enough on the soft tyre in Q3 for Verstappen to produce a brilliant lap which got him on the front row, but it didn’t work as well on the medium or hard.

So driver performance was super important at Miami. That’s a crucial point amid all the (justified) criticism of the regulations. The regs were not the dominant factor here.

Red Bull’s big upgrade made the car feel connected enough to give Verstappen access to his amazing ability of exploiting a super-sharp front end to get rotation without then losing time through scrubbing on the exit. That and a much-improved steering system giving him the feel he needs is what got him into the competitive picture for the first time in ’26 and which left team-mate Isack Hadjar (0.825sec off in Q3) reeling.

The safety car then gave Verstappen the opportunity of getting off his flat-spotted tyres and onto the hards. It was worth a gamble but the safety car came too early for the ploy to work. He eventually floated up to the lead but was a sitting duck to the much newer-tyred Antonelli, Norris, Leclerc and Piastri who all surged past after their stops.

After the restart Leclerc’s tyres were not great and his fight to retain the lead was doomed as first Norris, then Antonelli piled past him and he fell back into the Russell/Piastri contest. There was then a phase where Norris looked to have it all under control, 2sec in the lead and with the threat of rain falling away.

But perhaps McLaren was a little complacent for on the 27th lap Mercedes pulled the plug with an undercut attempt. The stop was good, Antonelli’s out-lap was good. Better, in fact than Norris’s in-lap as McLaren tried to respond the next lap. There was time lost to Mercedes in the pitlane too and although Norris rejoined still just in front, Antonelli was alongside him and past.

Teamwork and driver performance is what won Antonelli and Mercedes this race, Kimi withstanding a long onslaught of Norris pressure for the remainder of the race to put himself 20 points clear at the head of the championship. Fighting Piastri for third, Leclerc’s spin on the penultimate lap and suspension damage as he nudged the wall in collecting it saw him hobbled and passed also by Russell and Verstappen. Twenty-seconds-worth of track limits penalties then dropped Leclerc from sixth to eighth. A real roller-coaster ride, with the also-hobbled Hamilton the sixth place beneficiary.

But this was all just background chaos to the composed performance of the 19-year-old who’d just taken the field apart.

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