Ferrari Facing Upgrade “Concern” After Miami Package Fails to Deliver Expected Performance

Ferrari arrived in Miami with no fewer than 11 new parts on its SF-26, the most extensive upgrade list of any team on the grid. They left with sixth and a seventh place finishes. That gap between ambition and outcome was what they drove home with following the race, and it has the team’s fans worried.

F1 journalist Lawrence Barretto, speaking on the F1 Nation podcast, discussed the feeling in the Scuderia garage.

“What was generally felt within the team this weekend is they’ve added performance, but they’ve not added anywhere near as much performance as I think they thought they would. Qualifying was a key area that they wanted to work on, so the one lap pace, and I think Charles probably realized very early on that while the car did feel better, they just hadn’t shut the gap in that metric.

“And I think that will be a concern because it will almost certainly have been a big part of their cost cap development budget that they would have spent on this package.”

Why the Rivals’ Steps Make It Worse

Having been the closest threat to Mercedes over the first three rounds of the season, Ferrari hoped to narrow the gap even further but the likes of McLaren and Red Bull also brought a raft of upgrades, and it looks like there’s are performing much better.

Red Bull had a poor start to 2026, with both Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar critical of the car (and the regulations), which means the Milton Keynes outfit was effectively starting from a lower base. Despite this, it still managed to leapfrog Ferrari in the pecking order. Lewis Hamilton, for his part, said after Sprint Qualifying that “I thought we would be stronger than we were today.”

Barretto continued:

“So, I think it is worrying. I think they’ll be more worried when they saw what Red Bull brought and how much of a step they were able to make. Obviously, how much of a step McLaren have made as well. So I think they will be concerned. Equally though, Ferrari have had a habit in the last couple of years of bringing parts and they don’t work.

“So I think that they probably shouldn’t be too hard on themselves because Charles probably should have had a podium again today. That would have made him three out of four podiums, so I guess it’s all relative to how well or how bad it’s been.”

Leclerc was running at the front for large stretches of the race before his disastrous final-lap. The package may not have delivered the leap in pace the team wanted, but the underlying car is far from slow.

Of course, bringing upgrades and understanding them enough to extract performance from them is two different things.

“I was talking to one technical director actually ahead of the weekend and he was like, ‘what if we bring all these bits and it’s one bit that doesn’t work? It’s going to take us ages to work out which bit.’ So I think actually let’s just let it play out a little bit longer.”

He added: “I actually still think Ferrari are in a good spot. It’s just this upgrade package just hasn’t delivered or they just haven’t found how to get the most out of it because they’ve only had 90 minutes of practice and it might just be that they bought too much stuff and they then don’t know.”

Ferrari’s own race report claimed the upgrades “worked as expected, bringing extra performance to the package.”

The team apparently believes the direction is right. Canada, where a second phase of development is already planned, will tell them how right.