F1 returns at Miami GP with talk of 'new championship' starting with car upgrades expected as field bids to catch Mercedes

The 2026 Formula 1 season finally resumes after its enforced break in April this week at a Miami Grand Prix which has been likened to the effective start of “a new championship”.

For the first time since the Japanese Grand Prix on March 29, F1’s teams will run together on track from Friday at the Miami International Autodrome following a five-week gap due in the original 24-race schedule for the cancellation of the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grands Prix.

Miami now represents the season’s fourth race weekend – and its second Sprint event – but the fact teams have had a month to work on their still-new 2026 cars back at their factories since Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli took the championship lead with victory at Suzuka means that the return to action is expected to be a little different to normal.

Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur – whose squad proved to be championship leaders Mercedes’ closest challengers in the races before the break and will be hoping to close the gap from Miami – said it would be like another start to the season.

“Everyone will bring new upgrades to Miami,” Vasseur told Sky Sports Italy at Suzuka.

“They’ll have time to work on the software, which is why I said a new championship will start.”

It was a sentiment that Mercedes counterpart Toto Wolff, whose team have won all three races and one Sprint so far, echoed with the Silver Arrows the ones everyone is trying to catch at the start of F1’s new rules era.

“Teams have learned, drivers are starting to learn how to optimise these systems to their benefit and we’ve seen that first indication [in Japan] that looked like a home run in the first two races but isn’t the case and we’ve always won,” said Wolff.

“Miami is going to be for me also a restart. How are the upgrades going to work that people are bringing? How have we optimised all the other systems?

“It’s going to be exciting.”

Upgraded cars, rules tweaks and one team to catch – Q&A on Formula 1’s return

Why were there no races in April?

F1 had been due to race in Bahrain on April 12, two weeks after Suzuka, before going straight on to Saudi Arabia on April 19, but both events were cancelled on safety grounds due to the conflict in the Middle East.

With no viable time to slot any replacement venues in, and with no other races scheduled in April, the cancellations created an unscheduled five-week break between events in the early part of F1’s 2026 season.

Discounting summer breaks, this has been the longest in-season gap between races since the opening two rounds of the 1999 campaign.

What have teams and drivers been doing in the break?

Unlike the August summer and off-season winter breaks, when teams must by regulation shut down their factories for set periods of time, the grid’s 11 outfits have been free to keep working on their cars unrestricted behind closed doors throughout April.

The year-long $215m (£159m) budget cap and the respective aerodynamic testing restrictions each team must work to remained in force, as did the ban on full in-season track testing (although some restricted running still took place in permitted filming and Pirelli test days). Schedules for early 2026 car development will have been set well before the Middle Eastern rounds were cancelled but the extended time at the factory will undoubtedly have allowed designers and engineers up and down the grid the chance to hone and enhance those packages for Miami and beyond.

Some teams, such as McLaren, had always eyed Miami – where the Woking factory introduced a game-changing upgrade in 2024 – as a venue for one of their first big early-season package of car upgrades. That will certainly be the case for the reigning world champions now, although they are not expecting to be the only ones who now go big this weekend and then in Canada in three weeks’ time.

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said last week: “In our intent there was always the idea to deliver sort of a completely new car, and especially from an aerodynamic upgrades point of view, for the North American races.

“We could keep up with this plan, obviously the fact that the calendar has been changed sort of helped a little bit like I’m sure helped all the other teams that could work more streamlined towards upgrading the car rather than being busy with racing.

“But I could say overall that across Miami and Canada (May 22-24) we will see an entirely new MCL40.

“Again I would like to stress that this is what I would expect of most of our competitors so not necessarily it’s going to be a shift in the packing order, it will be effectively just a check who has been able to add more performance within the same time frame and we also have some performance to recover if we look at Mercedes and to some extent Ferrari as well.”

Much focus on track from Friday will therefore be on the upgrades packages brought to cars through the field, how they then translate into lap time and whether there is any sign of significant pecking-order shuffle. For teams who started the season particularly disappointingly such as Aston Martin and Williams, the extended break clearly came at a very useful time and they will be hoping to be finding bigger relative jumps to the rest.

But, perhaps just as crucially, the break has also given teams time to churn through the reams of data and understanding gained from the opening three race weekends running the sport’s still very new and very complex 2026 cars.

That data will not only have fed into teams’ thinking on the type of aerodynamic upgrades to prioritise over the rest of the year, but how they can operate the cars and power units in the best way possible over a race weekend for improved performance.

As for the drivers, in addition to focusing on their fitness training and having an unexpected chance for some extra free time, they will have spent plenty of time working hard on team’s simulators and with their engineering teams to further understand how to maximise their respective cars and driving styles from Miami.

What has changed since F1 was last on track?

When they have not been working to improve their cars, teams’ technical chiefs have been among the groups in discussion with F1 and the FIA over tweaks to the regulations which have now been agreed to be introduced from Miami.

The alterations to the power-unit regulations focus on energy deployment and are particularly aimed at helping the drivers attack a qualifying lap in a more natural flat-out way and, in the race, ensuring there are less drastic closing speed present between cars at unwanted parts of the circuit.

In light of those changes and the fact F1 has been off track for five weeks, the first practice in Miami – which is also the only practice session of the Sprint weekend – will be extended from 60 to 90 minutes to allow drivers and teams chance to get fully up to speed with the new parameters.

What’s the state of play in the championship?

Mercedes resume the season leading both Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championships with three wins from the opening three race weekends, a start to the season which firmly underlined why they had been most pundits’ tips for the title well before the campaign started.

The Silver Arrows’ lead over second-placed Ferrari is 45 points with reigning two-champions McLaren already 89 points off the pace in third place, although boosted by an improved showing with second place at Suzuka.

1) Mercedes	135 points
2) Ferrari	90 points
3) McLaren	46 points
4) Haas	18 points
5) Alpine	16 points

Red Bull sit behind Haas and Alpine in sixth on just 16 points so far.

Mercedes drivers’, meanwhile, are first and second in the drivers’ standings, although it’s 19-year-old Kimi Antonelli who unexpectedly leads the way ahead of bookmakers’ favourite George Russell by 72 to 63 points after the Italian went back-to-back for the first two wins of his career in F1.

Drivers’ Championship – Top Five


1) Kimi Antonelli	72 points
2) George Russell	63 points
3) Charles Leclerc	49 points
4) Lewis Hamilton	41 points
5) Lando Norris	25 points

Charles Leclerc is the lead Ferrari driver in third place, 23 points behind Antonelli, with team-mate Lewis Hamilton eight point further behind in fourth before a bigger gap back to reigning champion Lando Norris in fifth on 25 points.

Oscar Piastri is sixth on 21 points, with Max Verstappen only ninth with 12 points amid Red Bull’s early struggles for pace.

Sky Sports F1’s Miami GP schedule

Thursday April 30
7pm: Drivers’ Press Conference
10pm: Paddock Uncut

Friday May 1
2.25pm: F2 Practice
4.30pm: Miami GP Practice One (session starts at 5pm)*
7.25pm: F2 Qualifying
8.10pm: Team Bosses’ Press Conference
8.40pm: Miami GP Sprint Qualifying (session starts at 9.30pm)

Saturday May 2
2.55pm: F2 Sprint
4pm: Miami GP Sprint build-up
5pm: MIAMI GP SPRINT
6.30pm: Ted’s Sprint Notebook
8pm: Miami GP Qualifying build-up*
9pm: MIAMI GP QUALIFYING*
11pm: Ted’s Qualifying Notebook*

Sunday May 3
5.25pm: F2 Feature Race
7pm: Miami GP build-up: Grand Prix Sunday*
9pm: THE MIAMI GRAND PRIX*
11pm: Miami GP reaction: Chequered Flag*
12am: Ted’s Notebook*

*Also on Sky Sports Main Event

Formula 1 returns from Friday with the Miami Grand Prix, the season’s second Sprint weekend, live on Sky Sports F1. Stream Sky Sports with NOW – no contract, cancel anytime

Showcase