Racing
© Jonathan Borba
Charles Leclerc says Formula 1’s 2026 season will be decided by development, with Ferrari heading to Miami convinced the five-week break could reshape the title fight but not expecting one upgrade package to erase Mercedes’ early edge.
Mercedes has won the opening three rounds and, in Leclerc’s words, “has the fastest package.” Ferrari has still opened the year with a podium at every race, with Leclerc finishing in the top three in Australia and Japan and Lewis Hamilton taking his first Ferrari podium in China. That has kept Ferrari in touch, but Leclerc made clear it is not where the team wants to be.
Charles Leclerc, Ferrari driver, told media including RacingNews365 that Ferrari is in “an okay-ish place,” but added: “We’re not here to only do podiums and we want to win races, which at the moment seems very difficult because Mercedes is at a very high level.” He said the championship “is going to be all about development and the upgrades that each team is going to bring.”
That is why Ferrari views Miami as a potential turning point. Ferrari team principal Frédéric Vasseur said the picture could look very different when racing resumes after the cancellations of the Bahrain and Saudi Arabia grands prix. “We are scoring points, but we know that from Miami it will probably be another championship,” Vasseur said. He added that the development race through the year will be “very long” because the pace of upgrades will be intense, so Ferrari must keep taking strong points, stay close to Mercedes and be “very efficient in terms of the championship.”
Ferrari did not treat the gap as downtime. The team used the break to push both car development and operations on the SF-26. Loïc Serra, Ferrari technical director, said the extra time allowed the team to go deeper into its data because it was not immediately dealing with another race weekend. Diego Ioverno, Ferrari sporting director, said: “What break? There was no break at all.”
Ioverno explained that Ferrari filled the weeks with reorganized work and extra pit-stop practice after a compressed pre-season left the team short on preparation. He said Ferrari completed only “one third” of its planned pit-stop sessions before the first race, so the unexpected gap allowed it to recover work that could not be done in January and February.
Even so, Ferrari has played down the idea that the enforced pause created a chance for a radically different development push. Speaking to Motorsport.com, Serra said Ferrari’s program had been planned “a long time ago” and that “you stick to your development plan.” He said missing two races was only a “small” factor in the broader SF-26 project and did not change what the team could find at the factory.
That fits with Leclerc’s caution heading into Miami. Ferrari ran a filming day with the SF-26 at Monza before the race weekend and Leclerc said there are “quite a few things coming up soon,” with “a package and a half” planned for Miami. But he stopped well short of predicting an immediate step.
“We are working very hard and especially the people back at the factory are working extremely hard to bring upgrades as soon as possible,” Leclerc said. “Whether this is going to make the difference or not, I don’t know. I’m pretty sure the others are not on vacation either, so it’s going to be tough.”
That leaves Ferrari in a position where its strong, all-podium start has bought time, but not control. If Miami does open what Vasseur called “another championship,” Ferrari’s chance of turning podium consistency into wins will depend less on one weekend’s package than on whether it can out-develop Mercedes over the races that follow.