Miami did something the first three races of 2026 had failed to do. It tightened the grid. Mercedes still won, Kimi Antonelli still looked like a generational driver, but the Mercedes advantage stopped looking untouchable. McLaren got close. Ferrari led laps. Red Bull found something. And now every team in the paddock is heading to Imola with a clearly defined upgrade brief.
Mercedes leads the constructors on 180 points and Antonelli leads the drivers on 100, with George Russell second on 80. From the outside that looks dominant. Internally, Toto Wolff is openly worried about race starts. Antonelli nearly threw away his Miami win at turn one, and Wolff conceded the issue is not on the driver. "For me, that was his best race so far," Wolff said, while also acknowledging that Mercedes is not giving its drivers good enough launch tools off the line. The Brackley upgrade brief for Imola, on the public evidence, is not a revolution but a polish job: cleaner launches, better one-lap balance and tyre life in hotter races.
McLaren leaves Miami knowing it had a winning car and didn't execute. Lando Norris finished 3.264 seconds behind Antonelli, with Oscar Piastri third. Andrea Stella, normally one of the more measured team principals on the grid, did not soften it. He said the win slipped away through execution and optimisation, and confirmed McLaren has "some more upgrades coming from the same development stream." That last phrase matters. It signals McLaren's Miami package was not the full story, but the start of a chain of parts. If the next McLaren car steps forward in Imola, the championship stops being Mercedes versus everyone and becomes a two-team fight.
Ferrari is the team under the most pressure heading into Imola. Maranello is second on 110 points, but already 70 points behind Mercedes after just four rounds, and Miami went badly. Charles Leclerc led, then unravelled with a final-lap spin and a penalty that dropped him to eighth. Hamilton finished sixth, complaining of "no man's land" pace. Vasseur has confirmed that Ferrari will bring small upgrades to Imola, not season-saving ones. The bigger Ferrari hand, on team admission, is being held back for Barcelona, where the FIA's new front-wing flex tests force every team into a reset. Vasseur has said that "everybody will have a new front wing in Barcelona," effectively turning that race into a soft technical regulation change. Ferrari needs Imola to stop the bleeding without compromising what it has planned for that reset.
Red Bull is the most fascinating of the lot. Verstappen finished 48.949 seconds behind the winner in Miami, a damage-limitation result by any normal Red Bull standard. Christian Horner has publicly downplayed the Imola response, telling reporters "there is no big update in the next step" and that progress will come through incremental gains. The Miami floor added downforce but did not solve the car's balance window across different corner types, which remains the underlying RB22 problem.
Further down the grid, Williams is the team riding the most positive narrative. James Vowles has confirmed that the Miami double-points haul came from a backlog of more than thirty active development projects, with more upgrades flagged for Canada. After a stronger-than-expected start, Vowles is now openly trying to manage expectations rather than dampen them.
Imola is not a championship-deciding race. But it is the first race in the post-Miami reality, where Mercedes is no longer running away with anything. What teams choose to bring to Italy, and what they choose to hold back for Barcelona, will tell us a lot about who genuinely believes they can fight for the 2026 title.
Source: youtube.com