Ferrari F1 hopes come crashing down over 'soul-destroying' 2026 upgrades

Ferrari brought a whopping 11 upgrades to the Miami Grand Prix last time out, and after a five-week enforced break from the calendar, many expected the Italian team to take a leap forward.

But when Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc got out on track in Miami to show off those upgrades, they appeared no closer to the frontrunners.

In fact, not only did the Scuderia seem to suffer an underwhelming round of upgrades, but they also showed signs at the fourth round of the season that they could be set to be overtaken by their rivals in the competitive order.

For 2026, the chassis and power unit regulations have been completely overhauled, with Mercedes coming out on top as the strongest of the pack.

The Silver Arrows currently lead both the constructors' championship and the drivers' standings thanks to Kimi Antonelli, whose weak point remains his race starts.

This initially worked to Ferrari's advantage given their lightning fast starting procedure handed them an early launch off the line on more than one occasion, but over the course of a a full-length grand prix, they are still behind their competitors.

And some event think things could be about to get worse for the Maranello-based squad with McLaren tipped to overtake them.

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What's next for Ferrari after Miami F1 disappointment?

Following some underwhelming results in Miami, Jake Humphrey, Otmar Szafnauer and Rob Smedley discussed the situation at the Scuderia on the High Performance Racing Podcast.

Ex-Alpine F1 boss Szafnauer kicked off the discussion, saying: "I think McLaren soon will leapfrog Ferrari in the championship. They're still behind, but they had a strong weekend McLaren."

Podcast host Humphrey later asked whether Ferrari will be feeling depressed considering the vast amount of upgrades they brought to Miami seemingly didn't help to improve their performance.

Former Ferrari race engineer Smedley then replied: "100 per cent it is. It's slightly soul-destroying because from a technical point of view, it starts essentially like this negative loop that you've then got to [ask], 'What did you bring? What's working? What's not working?'

"If it's not correlating, as in like the wind tunnel or your simulation tools are not matching what's on track, you've then got to do this whole reverse engineering process where you go back to the tunnel and that holds up all of the development in the tunnel that you should be doing."

Szafnauer then weighed in: "Two things that happen. You have finite resources and now you're putting those resources on correlation, not making the car go faster. And the reason you're doing that is because if you don't have good correlation, it's only luck that you make the car go faster, right? So you've got to fix that if that's what their issue is first and foremost.

"But the same engineers that would be looking at performance on track performance are now looking at correlation issues. Right? Different teams have different groups."

"If you've got perfect correlation, no problem. But if you wake up and you don't and you only have three people in APG (Aero Performance Group), you're going to struggle. Then what happens is just what I described. You get your aerodynamicist looking at correlation and now they're not looking at making the car go faster. So it is a problem."

Smedley, who was Felipe Massa's race engineer at the Scuderia between 2006 and 2014, then concluded: "Tunnel and simulation time which is limited through the aerodynamic testing regulations, the ATR, you're only allowed so much, it's a mix of wind tunnel time and CFD time, computational fluid dynamics, and if you have to spend that on working out why your car isn't correlating on track rather than developing the car to be faster and faster, in technical terms, you’re f*****."

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Written by

Kerry Violet - F1 News Editor

Having graduated from the University of Sheffield with a 2:1 in Journalism in 2022, Kerry continued her pursuit of finding a full-time position in motorsport through work with the F1 Arcade in London, where she got to meet true fans of the sport and make a live grand prix watch party memorable for them. It was here that she confirmed her dream of combining her background in journalism and love of motorsport, going on to volunteer with the female-led platform Empoword Journalism. Having completed stints as a screen editor and sports editor, Kerry landed her first F1-specific editorial role with GPFans and has thoroughly enjoyed continuing to work closely with the sport ever since. The access GPFans offers Kerry has allowed her to interview big names such as Naomi Schiff and David Coulthard and given her experiences she could only have dreamt of as a young F1 fan.

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