Can Hamilton repeat his F1 sprint win? What to watch for at Miami GP

The Formula 1 championship battle heads to Miami for the sixth round of the 2025 season as it continues to heat up, with Oscar Piastri leading the standings and Lando Norris willing to bounce back and repeat last year’s Miami triumph.

Add in the unpredictability of a sprint weekend and a forecast hinting at possible thunderstorms on Sunday, and the event should become a must-see.

Here are the main topics to watch out for this weekend.

Can Norris find redemption at the site of his first win?

A year on from his maiden Formula 1 victory, Lando Norris arrives in Miami in need of finding the confidence he lost over the Japan/Bahrain/Saudi Arabia triple-header and, perhaps more importantly, of emerging as the leading McLaren driver.

Oscar Piastri has won three of the first five grands prix this season and has the momentum after two consecutive victories, which meant the Australian has taken the championship lead from his team-mate going into this weekend’s race.

Norris, meanwhile, hasn’t won since the season-opening Australian GP and left Saudi Arabia after making a costly mistake in qualifying that that erased his chances of fighting in front, having looked like the fastest driver most of the weekend.

The 2024 Miami Grand Prix marked a turning point for Norris and McLaren, both taking a big step forward which they built on throughout the year to become championship contenders after a slow start to the season.

Now in a very different situation, Norris needs Miami to be a turning point once more if he doesn’t want to lose too much ground in the title fight.

Will Verstappen make up for Red Bull’s shortcomings again?

Leaving the decision to cut through Turn 2 at Jeddah aside, Max Verstappen‘s 2025 season has so far been almost flawless, the Dutchman having maximised pretty much every single opportunity to stay within touching distance of the McLarens.

The disparity between Verstappen and his two team-mates this year makes Red Bull’s actual form harder to gauge accurately, but there’s no denying that the world champion has been driving at his very best to make up for the deficiencies of his car.

Verstappen has a great record in Miami, having won the first two races there and last year’s sprint as well. While Norris looked very strong in the 2024 race, Verstappen could have kept a perfect record had it not been for the timing of the safety car.

Miami has plenty of low-speed corners and is more rear-limited, which are two factors that won’t help Red Bull’s current car.

Having said that, it would be foolish to rule out Verstappen given his current form.

Can Hamilton repeat his China sprint form?

In similar fashion to Norris, Lewis Hamilton is in desperate need of a turnaround following a below-par start to the season that has affected the seven-time champion’s morale. Hamilton has been so pessimistic as to suggest that he doesn’t see a solution to his problems at Ferrari.

While he made some positive noises in Bahrain, where the Scuderia introduced some significant updates, his tone after a very difficult Saudi Arabian GP weekend was downbeat and the pressure to bounce back is starting to increase.

With Miami being a sprint weekend, it appears Ferrari will not be introducing any major updates and will instead wait for the first race of the European season at Imola to upgrade the SF-25.

The car is still proving hard to set up, with a very narrow performance window that only Charles Leclerc has so far managed to work within, so having no updates for Miami offers little hope for Hamilton.

He said after the Jeddah race that he would cancel his plans to have a week off and would instead travel to Maranello to try to find some solutions.

Hamilton has so far won the only sprint race of the year in China, and it will be interesting to see if the shorter race in Miami allows Ferrari to run its car closer to the ground, making the skid block wear that got both its cars disqualified from the Shanghai race less of an issue.

If Ferrari and Hamilton shine again in the sprint, at least both will have some answers about his struggles.

Will the upgrades battle kick off?

As mentioned above, sprint weekends are often not the preferred events for teams to bring major updates for their cars, and is yet to be seen whether things will be different this time around in Miami.

With only one practice session to test new parts, many teams would rather wait for a normal grand prix weekend to run major upgrades, so Imola should, in theory, be where most big updates start to make their appearance.

Having said that, McLaren broke that trend last year and brought the well-documented major upgrade package to Miami. However, the team itself admitted that its introduction was originally scheduled for Imola, but that it had managed to have it ready ahead of time and, given its lack of competitiveness, it didn’t have much to lose.

Applying that same logic to this year, the teams more likely to introduce updates in Miami will be the ones aiming to catch up.

Another one-stop race?

Despite Pirelli’s attempt to spice up the race with strategy options in Saudi Arabia, its decision to use a softer compound selection at Jeddah didn’t work at all as drivers opted for one stop, just as they had done in previous years, opting to conserve their tyres rather than suffer the time penalty of an additional pitstop.

That is, unfortunately, the current reality of Formula 1 and the trend appears unlikely to change in Miami.

Pirelli has opted once more to bring a softer selection for the race: C3 as hard, C4 as medium and C5 as soft, which is one step softer than the Miami range last season, where a one-stop strategy was the norm.

The smooth track surface means tyre degradation is unlikely to be much of an issue despite the high temperatures expected during the weekend, making a safety car period the only real factor that could give fans the chance of seeing any sort of alternative strategy.