Guenther Steiner isn’t buying the idea that Miami is about to flip the 2026 season on its head — not even with Formula 1 arriving with a fresh set of energy rules and the paddock buzzing about who they’ll hurt most.
His call is simple: Mercedes stays on top, the intra-team fight gets another chapter, and Max Verstappen remains the best of the rest. Specifically, Steiner is predicting a Miami Grand Prix podium of Kimi Antonelli P1, George Russell P2, and Verstappen third — a wet race in Florida, but a familiar result.
It’s a prediction that cuts against the current mood around the championship. Four races in, Mercedes has set the pace everywhere that counts: every pole position, a win, and back-to-back one-two finishes in Australia and China. The early points picture reflects it too. Mercedes has already opened a 45-point cushion over Ferrari in the Constructors’ standings, while Antonelli leads the Drivers’ Championship by nine points from Russell.
And yet Miami is being billed as a reset point. Not because the circuit is some unique outlier — though it does ask different questions of the cars — but because the sport has quietly moved the goalposts on how the new-era power units can be used across a weekend.
For Miami, F1 has reduced the permitted energy recharge in qualifying to 7MJ, aimed at cutting down the heavy “clipping” and the awkward-looking compromise laps that come with constant harvesting. Meanwhile, maximum Boost during the grands prix has been trimmed to +150 kW. It’s a blanket change for all five power unit manufacturers, but the paddock assumption has been that Mercedes could be among the most exposed, given how effectively the works team has been managing energy compared to its rivals.
That’s the theory, anyway. Steiner’s view is more grounded in the pattern we’ve already seen: Mercedes is strong enough that even a nudge to the rulebook won’t be enough to knock it off its perch immediately.
“I think Mercedes will win,” Steiner said, speaking to a betting website. “I think they are pretty strong and it will be a good battle between the two guys at Mercedes, between Kimi and George.”
The interesting bit isn’t that Steiner thinks Mercedes wins — plenty do, even if they’re dressing it up as a “Miami will be different” weekend. It’s his take on Verstappen’s ceiling if the new deployment limits do bite.
“I think Max will maybe surprise us, though, because Miami as a track is a little bit different for the cars with the power units,” Steiner added. “So, I think we will see less of the charging and recharging, which will help Max make it to the podium.”
There’s a neat tension in that logic. If Mercedes has indeed been extracting more performance from smarter energy management, then less room to exploit that advantage should pull the field closer — and in that world, Verstappen doesn’t need a miracle to get involved. He just needs the race to become more “normal”: less defined by who can game the energy budget most cleanly, and more defined by who can lean on the tyres, hit the apexes, and manage the chaos when grip disappears.
That last point matters because Steiner is calling this as a wet Miami, and wet races have a way of compressing form without fully rewriting it. The best teams still tend to float to the top, but the gaps soften, strategy gets messy, and a driver with Verstappen’s instincts suddenly doesn’t need to be in the fastest car to dictate large parts of the afternoon.
Miami also lands after a four-week gap from Japan — enough time for teams to do more than bolt on a small aerodynamic tweak and call it an “update”. Everyone has been back at the factories, and the expectation in the paddock is that the pecking order will be prodded by visible development steps across the grid. Even if the energy rule change turns out to be marginal, the upgrades might not be.
Still, Steiner’s bet is that whatever arrives on the cars, Mercedes’ baseline remains the reference — and the more intriguing fight is the one happening under the same roof.
Antonelli has started 2026 like a driver who doesn’t care for the script. He’s leading the championship and has immediately made Mercedes’ long-term succession plan look like a present-tense reality. But Steiner isn’t ready to declare the teenager the favourite over a full campaign, particularly with Russell now deep into his F1 career and finally staring at a title-worthy car.
When asked who he backs for the Drivers’ Championship from here, Steiner didn’t hedge.
“For me, it’s George,” he said. “Mercedes is very strong this year, and George with his experience, will at some stage take him to winning the World Championship, and more importantly, he really wants one. He puts all the effort in.
“It’s been a long time for him to wait to have this opportunity, and it’s there now, and he will take it. I don’t think he will miss out on it.”
It’s a very Steiner answer: less romance, more inevitability. Antonelli might have the early numbers, but Russell has the scars — eight years of learning where weekends go wrong, how points swing, and how quickly momentum can turn when a title fight becomes a game of damage limitation rather than highlight reels.
Miami, then, isn’t just a test of whether the new energy limits shuffle the order. It’s another pressure point in a young season where Mercedes has two drivers who can both reasonably believe the team’s championship lead is, in part, theirs to claim.
And if Steiner’s right, Verstappen will be watching it unfold from the same place he’s spent too little time in recently: on the podium, close enough to remind everyone that even a Mercedes-dominated start doesn’t mean the rest of the year will be handed to them.
