Scuderia Ferrari arrived in Miami with 11 upgrades after a five-week enforced break from the 2026 campaign and left with more questions than answers. Lewis Hamilton finished seventh in the sprint, Charles Leclerc reached the top three, and on Sunday Hamilton was damaged on lap one after a collision with Franco Colapinto at Turn 11.
That was enough for Karun Chandhok to call the weekend “overall a bit disappointing” and to warn that Ferrari should be thinking hard about whether there is more performance left to unlock from the package. He said Hamilton was “just behind Charles by a couple of tenths, two, three tenths all weekend,” and argued that the team should be concerned if the update is not producing more, especially with rivals moving quickly as McLaren and Red Bull appeared to have come on leaps and bounds after the break.
The scale of the letdown is sharper because Ferrari had reason to expect more from Miami. Hamilton and Leclerc had already shown the benefit of Ferrari’s lightning fast starting procedure in earlier grands prix, and Hamilton had at least broken through for a podium in China after a miserable maiden season in red had produced no grand prix podium before that. Miami, though, was supposed to be the weekend where the new parts moved Ferrari forward again.
Instead, the sprint and the race told different versions of the same story. Leclerc gave Ferrari a strong result in the sprint, but Hamilton’s P7 left the team short of the kind of one-two punch an upgrade weekend is built to deliver. On Sunday, the lap one hit from Colapinto at Turn 11 only deepened the damage to Hamilton’s race and underlined how quickly a promising weekend can unravel once the field gets into traffic.
David Croft put the scale of the setback bluntly, saying that coming home with a sixth and an eighth from an upgrade weekend was “massive disappoint.” The results do not erase Ferrari’s early-season flashes, but they do leave the team facing a harder question now: whether the Miami package has simply not delivered enough, or whether the next step forward will have to come from elsewhere before the pack stretches out even further.
