FIA STATEMENT ON MIAMI GRAND PRIX 2026 | START TIME MOVED FOLLOWING EXTREME WEATHER

 

LANDO NORRIS BEATS KIMI ANTONELLI FOR MIAMI GP SPRINT POLE

May 1, 2026; Miami Gardens, FL, USA; McLaren driver Lando Norris (1) during Sprint qualifying before the Crypto.com Miami Grand Prix at Miami International Autodrome. Mandatory Credit: Nathan Ray Seebeck-Imagn Images

McLaren's Lando Norris beat out Mercedes' young star and Formula 1 championship leader Kimi Antonelli for pole position in spring qualifying Friday at the Miami Grand Prix.

Norris emerged from a one-lap shootout in SQ3 0.222 seconds better than Antonelli, with McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri in third, Ferrari's Charles Leclerc fourth and Red Bull's Max Verstappen fifth.

The Brit earned McLaren's first P1 of the young season with his SQ3 time of 1:27.869.

"It was great, a perfect result for us," Norris said, per Formula1.com. "A nice way to reward the team. We've got a lot of new upgrades on the car, so it's nice to feel some grip again and nice to reward the guys and the girls that have put a lot of work into this. I've always loved Miami, both on and off the track. It's a good result for us. Of course, it's just the beginning of the weekend, still a long way to go but nice to kick it off by doing this."

Norris is the reigning F1 World Drivers' champion and won seven Grand Prix last year; he also earned his first F1 victory at the 2024 Miami Grand Prix. Meanwhile, the 19-year-old Italian Antonelli has won each of the last two F1 stops, the Chinese and Japanese Grand Prix, starting from the pole each time.

Next comes the Sprint on Saturday at noon. The Miami Grand Prix is slated for Sunday afternoon.

--Field Level Media

THE 2026 RULE CHANGE HIT MIAMI FIRST | HERE'S WHAT'S DIFFERENT THIS WEEKEND

Formula 1 didn’t wait for the off-season to fix its problems. Three races in, the FIA called an emergency meeting, got unanimous agreement from every team, and pushed through four regulation changes that take effect this weekend at the 2026 Miami Grand Prix. It’s the first race back after an unplanned five-week break due to the war in Iran, and the first big test of these regulation changes.

Here’s what changed and why it matters this weekend in Miami.

Superclipping Is Getting Reined In

This is the one fans have complained about most. Superclipping is what happens when the car harvests energy to recharge its battery while still at full throttle — meaning the driver has the pedal pinned, but the car slows down anyway. On a straight. For no visible reason. It looked strange on television and felt worse from the cockpit.

The fix: maximum permitted energy recharge per lap drops from 8 MJ to 7 MJ, while peak superclip power increases from 250 kW to 350 kW. Less time recharging, faster when it happens. In practice, drivers should spend roughly two to four seconds per lap in superclip instead of the six to eight we’ve seen through the first three rounds. Not eliminated, but meaningfully reduced.

Corner Deployment Is Now Capped

Credit: F1

The second change addresses something drivers have flagged as genuinely dangerous. When a car activates its electrical boost exiting a corner, the sudden surge in power creates extreme closing speeds on the following straight. The car behind goes from a manageable gap to near-collision territory in a fraction of a second.

The fix: power deployment outside of the main acceleration zones — corner exit to braking point — is now capped at 250 kW, with the boost limited to 150 kW above the current power level at activation. Full 350 kW is still available where it belongs. The dangerous spikes are gone.

Race Starts Have a New Detection System

Starts have been a problem all season. Under 2026 regulations, drivers must rev at high RPM for 10 seconds before lights out to spool the turbo, while simultaneously managing battery reserves from the formation lap. In fact, four-time world champion Max Verstappen has botched every start this year. He’s not alone.

The new start detection system more precisely identifies car movement off the line and tightens the deployment window at the moment the lights go out. It won’t be visible to fans watching at home, but teams will feel it immediately. If it works, the chaos that has reshuffled the order three weekends running should stabilize.

Updated Wet Weather Protocols

The least dramatic change on paper, but potentially the most relevant this weekend at the 2026 Miami Grand Prix. New rules and systems govern how power deployment changes in wet conditions. Given Sunday’s forecast of an 88% chance of rain and a 53% chance of thunderstorms, this one could matter more than any of the others.

Under U.S. law, any outdoor event must be halted if lightning is in the area — which means this race could be red-flagged even without standing water on the track. The FIA has a contingency plan ready. The updated wet-weather protocols are part of it. That includes limiting MGU-K deployment under low-grip conditions, such as rain. That means that boost mode is unavailable.

Miami is the test bed. Five weeks of work, four unanimous changes, one race weekend to find out if any of it produces better racing. Watch the first lap carefully — and keep an eye on the sky.

- Scott Gulbransen

MIAMI GRAND PRIX SCHEDULE | FORMULA 1

 

ARE LANDO NORRIS AND MCLAREN A THREAT TO RED BULL NOW?

 MIAMI -- The sight of any car pulling a gap on Max Verstappen's Red Bull has been rare in F1's recent past but Lando Norris was able to canter away from the three-time world champion to secure his maiden F1 win at Sunday's Miami Grand Prix.

Norris' victory margin of nearly eight seconds was, by Formula One's recent standards, a rout of Verstappen and his dominant RB20 car. On the surface it is easy to get excited about the nature of his win given the one-sided championship season we have seen to this point and the ease with which Verstappen has won the other four races he has finished in 2024.

Even more tantalizing was the fact Norris' victory -- his first in 110 F1 race starts -- came at the first attempt with the big upgrade package McLaren brought to the race, its first significant one of the year so far. Teammate Oscar Piastri will also have the new package for F1's next race, Imola's Emilia Romagna Grand Prix.

While a new race winner will always prompt excitable statements about a new reality at the front, there were clear extenuating circumstances which helped end Norris' winless streak.

The collision between Kevin Magnussen and Logan Sargeant which prompted the Safety Car changed the course of the contest, rewarding Norris and McLaren for going long with the first stint. The Magnussen-Sargeant clash happened shortly after Norris had moved from fifth up to first as his rivals pitted. The British driver had been carefully managing his tyres in a bid to attack with fresh rubber later in the race.

McLaren felt like Norris' extended first stint would have left him with the pace to attack at the end of the race had there not been a Safety Car, although he was skeptical he could have made enough passes on track to win the race in that scenario.

"It would have been tough," Norris said on the hypothetical of a race without a Safety Car. "I would have had to overtake two Ferraris, a Red Bull, Oscar [Piastri]."

Then there was the state of Red Bull's car all weekend, and notably Verstappen's during the race itself. Despite taking pole position for the sprint (which he won) and for the grand prix, Verstappen and Red Bull struggled to get their hands around the set-up of the car around the Miami circuit.

Verstappen potentially complicated matters further when he went straight over the Turn 14/15 chicane, knocking over a cone in the process.

"I don't think we had a great balance all weekend," Red Bull boss Christian Horner said on Sunday evening. "Obviously, he hit the bollard around Lap 20 and that has actually done quite a lot of damage to the underside of the car, so we will have to look at exactly what the effect of that was.

"It is a reasonable amount of the area around the left rear floor. There is a reasonable amount that's missing and you can see it awfully flexing as well, so it certainly wouldn't be helping."

Verstappen himself made light of the incident -- joking "I didn't like [the cone], so I decided to take it out and test the durability of the front wing as well!" -- but downplayed Horner's suggestion it had a negative impact on his car's performance.

Red Bull later explained Verstappen had not seen pictures of the car before going into the news conference. "He lost two-and-a-half-tenths in Turn 1 every lap," Horner said. "Whether that was because of the damage... when you actually see the pictures of what was missing, it wasn't designed like that."

McLaren came away from the weekend excited at the clear gains made with the upgrade and just with its pace in general. Raw lap times in the race had looked good. Even Piastri, driving in the "old-spec" McLaren without all the upgrades Norris had available to him, had looked competitive before a tangle with Carlos Sainz ruined his race. Team boss Andreas Stella played down the suggestion Norris' win was a sign of a new reality in F1 in the immediate future.

"I think yes, we improved the car," Stella said of the upgraded package. "We know in the numbers how much we improved it. And it's material, you see it in lap time.

"But I think this race for Red Bull was a little bit of a struggle. So before we say the pace we saw today is a representative of the future, I'm not going to put my signature on this statement."

The race represented another feather in Stella's cap, having also orchestrated the huge turnaround McLaren achieved last year when it leaped from the back of the order to being Red Bull's closest rival on the back of one upgrade at the Austrian Grand Prix in June 2023. Another successful upgrade will only heighten the optimism and momentum which Stella has cultivated since stepping into the team boss role.

It will also serve as a reminder about just how tangible progress can be with the right development path.

"We take this positive, we take this encouragement," Stella added on Sunday. "If anything it's even more energy to develop in my view, if you want to fight consistently Red Bull, we need to deliver another package like the one we have delivered here.

"In Japan we were sixth-tenths away in qualifying of Red Bull. In China we were a few tenths away. It would be completely unrealistic to think what we've seen here is the updated picture of competitiveness. I think here Red Bull didn't get the most out of their package."

Teammate Piastri will get the same upgrade in two weeks as McLaren goes to Imola's Emilia Romagna Grand Prix at full strength. Red Bull will still expect to be the benchmark team on pace, but McLaren's competitiveness will be a major talking point going into the next race.

Fans who were growing bored of seeing Verstappen cruise to victories most weekends can take comfort in the fact McLaren seems to be on a strong development path and that there are big steps forward still to be found under the current regulations.

- Nate Saunders, General Editor, F1

MIAMI GRAND PRIX | COMING SOON

 

F1 RACE CLASSIFICATION | LAP 57/57 | MIAMI | #MIAMIGP