Max Verstappen didn’t need to be prompted into selling Miami as a turning point for Red Bull — but he also wasn’t pretending the RB22 has suddenly become a title-winning weapon overnight.
After rolling out a sizeable upgrade package at the Miami Autodrome, Verstappen produced his best grid result of the 2026 season in Sprint qualifying, putting the car fifth and, notably, ahead of George Russell’s Mercedes. It’s hardly the Red Bull benchmark fans have been conditioned to expect, yet in the context of a start to the year where the team has routinely been staring at deficits nudging a second in qualifying, it landed like a small jolt of momentum.
On raw numbers, Verstappen was 0.592s slower than Lando Norris on Friday. On feeling, he reckons the step is bigger than that.
“It feels more together,” Verstappen said. “Of course, there’s still things that we are working on, but it has been a really positive step for us.
“Last few races, we were like over a second behind. I would say we have almost halved that gap now. So that’s positive.”
That choice of words matters. Verstappen’s been as blunt as anyone in the paddock when a car is simply not in the window; this was less a marketing line and more the sort of appraisal you get when a driver finally feels he can start leaning on the thing again. He described the upgraded RB22 as “a bit more normal”, and that’s about as revealing as he tends to get. When the car is unpredictable, he drives like he’s constantly negotiating with it. When it’s “normal”, the lap time tends to follow.
The changes themselves were significant by current standards: Red Bull arrived in Miami with seven new parts, six performance-focused, and it wasn’t just a token floor tweak. The team introduced a ‘Macarena’ rear wing concept in the style Ferrari has pushed, alongside revisions to the sidepod inlets, engine cover, mirror support geometry and rear corner. A new floor and front wing completed the package, with Verstappen immediately near the front in the extended practice session — second quickest — before that Sprint qualifying result backed it up under pressure.
Still, the Dutchman wasn’t trying to hide where it’s hurting.
“We’re still very weak in the first sector, which is mainly high speed so we know we need to work on that,” he said. “The rest seemed a bit more together, so a bit happier with that, at least it seems like we have cleared a little bit the midfield.”
That last line was delivered with the sort of dry realism that defines Verstappen’s 2026 so far. Red Bull hasn’t been fighting for scraps in the traditional sense, but for a team that’s used to measuring itself against the front, “clearing the midfield” is a brutally honest milestone — and also a reminder of how far this season has drifted from expectation.
What Miami has done, though, is give Verstappen something he’s been lacking: trust. Not trust in the team’s effort — that’s never been in doubt — but trust in what the car will do at the point of commitment, the split-second where lap time lives.
“It feels a bit more normal, a bit more together,” he said. “It’s still not where I want it to be, obviously, but it’s at least allowing me to trust it a bit more and I can basically take a bit more time out of it.”
That’s Verstappen in a nutshell: even when there’s improvement, he frames it as an opportunity to extract more, not as an excuse to relax. And it’s also why this Miami step could be important beyond the optics of a single Sprint grid position. If Red Bull’s new baseline is simply more predictable, it opens doors in set-up work that haven’t been available when the car swings between behaviours — the sort of stuff that can’t be fixed with one aerodynamic kit, but can be gradually engineered into the car once you stop chasing your tail.
The stakes are already clear in the standings. Verstappen sits ninth in the Drivers’ Championship on 12 points, 60 behind leader Kimi Antonelli. Red Bull can’t afford many more weekends where it’s losing ground simply by being stuck in no man’s land.
There was a secondary storyline on the other side of the garage, too. Rookie team-mate Isack Hadjar reached the top 10 in Sprint qualifying, which on paper should’ve been a tidy Friday — except he was almost a second slower than Verstappen, a gap that left him visibly baffled.
“It was smooth at least,” Hadjar said. “Got through into SQ3 which is a start but then to be a second off, I don’t know why.
“I’ve never been more than a tenth off so far this year when it mattered, I don’t know what’s going on.”
In a weekend where Red Bull is trying to validate a major package, that’s an awkward contrast: Verstappen feeling the car is “more together”, Hadjar not understanding why he can’t access the same performance. Some of that can be adaptation to new parts, some of it can be confidence through the high-speed phase where Verstappen is still complaining the most — and some of it is just the harsh reality that Verstappen is often the quickest at translating a marginal improvement into a meaningful lap time.
Miami hasn’t magically restored Red Bull to the front, but it’s nudged the conversation away from damage limitation and towards development direction. Verstappen’s verdict was careful, but it carried something Red Bull has been missing this season: the sense that the car, at last, is starting to listen.
