Racing
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Ferrari’s 11-part Miami Grand Prix upgrade package has raised fresh concern over a possible correlation problem after the team failed to move closer to the front, with former Ferrari engineer Rob Smedley warning the result could send development of the SF-26 into a “slightly soul-destroying” negative loop.
Ferrari brought more new parts than any other team in Miami, including a new floor, diffuser and revised rear wing, but the weekend did not deliver the step it needed. Lewis Hamilton finished sixth, while Charles Leclerc was classified eighth after a post-race 20-second penalty, leaving Ferrari unable to get ahead of its main rivals despite the scale of the update push.
That is what made the outcome so damaging. Ferrari had opened 2026 strongly enough for Hamilton to score his first podium for the team in China, but Miami was meant to reinforce that progress. Instead, McLaren emerged with the bigger gain and cut Ferrari’s championship advantage over the Woking team to 16 points.
Speaking on the High Performance podcast, Rob Smedley, Ferrari’s former race engineer, said the setback was “100%. It’s slightly soul-destroying because it starts from a technical point of view. It starts essentially this negative loop that you’ve then got to [dissect]. What did you bring? What’s working? What’s not working?”
Smedley said the real danger comes if Ferrari’s simulation and wind tunnel picture does not match what the car is doing on track. In that case, he said, the team has to “go back to the tunnel” and begin reverse-engineering the problem, a process that “holds up all of the development in the tunnel that you should be doing.”
Otmar Szafnauer, the former Alpine team principal, said that kind of mismatch quickly becomes a resource problem as well as a performance one. “There are two things that happen,” Szafnauer said on the same podcast. “You have finite resources, and now you’re putting those resources on correlation, not making the car go faster.” He added that without good correlation, “it’s only luck” if a team finds lap time.
Szafnauer said the knock-on effect is that engineers who should be focused on performance are redirected into understanding why the data does not line up. He described that as a major setback for any development program, because the people meant to improve the car are instead trying to recover confidence in the tools behind it.
The immediate pressure on Ferrari is that McLaren’s Miami step looked more convincing than its own. Szafnauer said the competitive picture had shifted enough that Ferrari’s hold on second in the championship was already under threat. “I think McLaren soon will leapfrog Ferrari in the championship,” he said. “They’re still behind, but they had a strong weekend McLaren. Strong car. Big upgrades.”