Ferrari came to Miami with the sort of upgrade list you normally associate with a mid-season reset, not a warm early-May dabble. Eleven separate changes to the SF-26 — more than anyone else in the paddock — including a new floor and diffuser, plus a reworked version of its “Macarena” rear wing aimed at better drag reduction and more load when the car’s in its higher-downforce cornering configuration.
On paper, it was the kind of all-in swing that’s supposed to change the tone of a championship. In reality, it’s left rivals distinctly unimpressed.
Karun Chandhok says the reaction in the McLaren and Mercedes camps was closer to a shrug than a shiver. Speaking on Sky’s *The F1 Show* podcast, he described both teams as essentially unconvinced that Ferrari’s Miami package is the start of a title tilt — especially if there isn’t another wave of performance coming immediately.
The logic is brutally simple: if this was Ferrari unloading its best weaponry for the early part of 2026, and the result is still a weekend where it’s the third- or fourth-quickest story, why would the current front-runners start losing sleep?
Miami certainly began in a way that would have encouraged Ferrari to believe it had shifted something. Charles Leclerc topped the times in the extended FP1, almost three-tenths clear of Max Verstappen, and for a moment it looked like the big swing might land. That proved to be Ferrari’s only outright headline moment of the weekend.
Leclerc did manage third in the Sprint, but Sunday was where the upgrade package was meant to pay rent — and it didn’t. Ferrari ended the grand prix out of the top three for the first time this season, with Leclerc fifth and Lewis Hamilton seventh at the flag. Leclerc’s day then got messier: he was hit with a 20-second penalty for repeatedly gaining an advantage by cutting the corners on the final lap after clipping the wall.
In points terms, it was the kind of swing that turns an “upgrade weekend” into a “damage limitation weekend”. McLaren left Miami with a season-best 48 points thanks to double podiums, Mercedes banked 45, and Ferrari walked away with 20.
That gap matters because it reframes what Ferrari just did. Dropping a new floor, diffuser and wing revision is the loud part. The quiet part is what it does to your future development cadence — especially when rivals are already talking openly about spacing their own updates. McLaren, for instance, is understood to be drip-feeding improvements between Miami and Montreal, while Mercedes is bringing a bigger package to Canada.
Chandhok’s point, relayed from conversations he’s had inside those teams, is that Miami should have been Ferrari’s “step ahead” weekend. Instead, it’s left a sense that the Scuderia may have shown its hand early, without shifting the competitive order in the way it needed to.
He also noted how quickly perception can harden when the margins are tight and the optics are messy. Ferrari, in his view, looked like it had slipped relative to McLaren — and even with Mercedes “out of sync”, the Brackley team still outscored them heavily.
There’s also the Hamilton and Leclerc dynamic bubbling under this. Chandhok observed that Hamilton spent the weekend a couple of tenths behind Leclerc, close enough to suggest there isn’t a fundamental mismatch, but far enough that it feeds the ongoing question: is Ferrari’s new package giving both drivers the platform they need, or is it introducing characteristics that only one side of the garage can consistently lean on?
Hamilton, for his part, insisted Miami didn’t show the true picture of Ferrari’s progress. His race was compromised immediately by downforce damage after a lap-one collision with Franco Colapinto, and he argued the car felt stronger than the result suggests.
“I think we progressed going into qualifying, and the laps to the grid felt really strong,” Hamilton said. “I was already feeling like, ‘Yeah, we’re gonna be strong in this race’. And then, obviously, with the damage… it doesn’t really truly reflect the hard work that the team has done.”
It’s a fair point — but it’s also the kind of claim that only stands up if Ferrari shows it again next time out. The dangerous thing about arriving with a big package is that you invite immediate judgement, and F1 is a sport where rivals don’t grade you on potential. They grade you on what the stopwatch and the points table say after the chequered flag.
Ferrari’s argument now is that Miami was an incomplete read: a fast car interrupted by incidents, a floor and diffuser still being understood, a wing concept that can be optimised as set-up knowledge improves. That’s plausible. But the paddock is rarely generous when you’ve made as much noise as Ferrari did with its upgrade list.
Canada is looming as an inflection point. If McLaren and Mercedes bring meaningful performance there — as expected — Ferrari doesn’t just need to “extract more”. It needs to prove that Miami wasn’t the ceiling of this development path. Otherwise, the story of Ferrari’s 2026 campaign risks becoming familiar: ambitious upgrades, strong promises, and rivals quietly walking away with the bigger haul.
