Everything we learned from F1's 2026 Chinese Grand Prix
While Kimi Antonelli led George Russell in another Mercedes 1-2 up front, the state of what was going on further back was also pretty revealing during Formula 1's Chinese Grand Prix weekend.
Here are our key takeaways from Shanghai:
McLaren's title defence is collapsing already
No defending champion has scored fewer points in the opening two rounds (excluding sprints) of an F1 season since the points system changed in 2010 than McLaren has in 2026.
A miserable double DNS in China was attributed to two different problems with the same Mercedes power unit component.
The exact root cause of the two seemingly unlinked issues is yet to be determined, but McLaren hinted it was out of its control.
Whatever the outcome of that post-mortem, McLaren has a meagre points tally of 18, having been outscored at Shanghai by brand-new Mercedes customer Alpine.
That’s painful, for while McLaren’s car is nowhere near a match for Mercedes right now, it needs to keep itself in the hunt in case points-wise in case that changes.
Just look at 2024, when McLaren didn’t start the year with the fastest car, but banked a healthy number of points before an upgrade package at round six in Miami turned its car into one capable of overhauling Red Bull for the constructors’ title.
It will need a miracle weekend at Suzuka to avoid falling further away from the lead than it ever did in early 2024. - Josh Suttill
Red Bull risks slipping into F1's midfield
Despite Isack Hadjar qualifying directly behind the Mercedes for F1’s season-opener, Red Bull was really only the fourth-best team in Australia - and that got even worse in China, where Red Bull was dicing with the Haas, Alpine and Racing Bulls teams in the thick of the midfield fight.
All Max Verstappen has to show for the season so far is his sixth place in Melbourne. His Shanghai retirement from sixth with an ERS cooling problem leaves him behind even Haas’s Ollie Bearman and Alpine’s Pierre Gasly in the world championship.
It’s still early days, but China did reveal that Red Bull has some significant car problems. Even after Australia, Hadjar pointed to the car not being at its best in slow corners.
That will have hindered it slightly more at Shanghai than Melbourne, but there were other factors. Both drivers complained persistently about the all-round lack of grip.
The cold temperatures at Shanghai didn’t appear to help, and some of the explanation might also be in the struggle to get the Pirellis in the right window. However, proportionally, Red Bull’s qualifying pace was only about 0.3% worse than it was in Australia, and the improvement of the leading midfielders also played its part.
There’s little doubt that the biggest problem was the chassis and the grip level. Verstappen attributed some of the deficit to the engine side, but stressed it’s not the biggest factor.
The Red Bull power unit looked the second-best in Australia in terms of deployment, but had slipped behind Ferrari as well as Mercedes in China.
It’s too early to write off Red Bull’s chances - just look at it and Verstappen’s fightback into title contention last year. But you wouldn’t blame Verstappen for being concerned that this season could be at best one of working to build a better foundation for 2027, or at worst a complete waste of time. - Edd Straw
Ferrari is menacing Mercedes - on track and off
It’s obvious that Ferrari’s overall package needs to improve significantly to become a genuine threat to Mercedes in the title race, but the evidence of the first two races suggests for now Ferrari can at least be a real menace.
Ferrari’s compact turbo design is helping make its car a rocket ship off the startline, and that in itself is enough to make the races much more complicated for Mercedes.
No wonder then that Ferrari team boss Fred Vasseur is pushing back hard against any further changes to F1’s elongated start procedure that might use the Trojan Horse of safety concerns to help out his team’s main rival.
After claiming track position, the Ferrari is fast enough to then make a reasonable go at staying there, even if it’s ultimately futile.
If the Ferrari can stick within a second of the Mercedes, it makes use of the new Overtake engine mode this year that allows for a little more battery charging and deployment at speeds the MGU-K would normally stop deploying.
This helps a little but as Russell said during the Chinese Grand Prix, Ferrari “are just fast in all the right places”.
Ferrari’s got a good chassis and its engine looks strong off the corners. This makes it hard to latch right onto the back of them and then breeze by.
Even in China where the Mercedes had a clear speed advantage at the end of the long back straight, Ferrari’s big weapon was being able to come off the long Turn 13 just far enough ahead that its driver had a chance of staying ahead by the hairpin. Hence Russell losing five seconds to Antonelli by the time he’d worked his way by.
The Mercedes drivers should probably expect to finish first or second in a normal race at the moment, but Ferrari can clearly influence which order they finish in. And with lots of car development to come - and quite possibly an engine upgrade too, under F1’s new ‘balance of performance’ engine rules - Ferrari should realistically target at least winning races this season.
Right now, it’s almost inconceivable that at some point what makes the Ferraris so disruptive and the Mercedes so vulnerable in races will not combine in a way that facilitates a Leclerc or a Hamilton victory. - Scott Mitchell-Malm
Hamilton is revitalised
F1 2026 has clearly revitalised Hamilton, who confidently declared after scoring his first Ferrari grand prix podium: “I definitely feel like I’m back to my best.”
There is the obvious caveat that Hamilton also started 2025 brightly with Ferrari as his pace in Australia and China, where he won the sprint race, compared favourably with Leclerc a year ago too.
These first two events were at tracks where Leclerc believes he has not ever been particularly strong relative to his team-mates, and we do need to see Hamilton carry this form into races where Leclerc started to build clear momentum last year.
But there’s no denying Hamilton looks and sounds like a different man compared to how beaten-down he was by the end of 2025.
His speed and his racecraft in China was superb, and his first podium for Ferrari in a grand prix was earned entirely on merit.
Having two drivers getting the most out of a car that might be able to win a race will massively help Ferrari actually do so. - SMM
Alonso's not sparing Honda any blushes
Honda had the disappointment of its engine shaking Fernando Alonso into retirement in China as the big pre-Australia declaration that the drivers fear “nerve damage” from chassis vibrations turned into an actual, race-ending problem for the first time.
“I was struggling a little bit to feel my hands and my feet,” said Alonso after the race. “It was worse today than any other session in the weekend, to be honest.”
There’s no reason to think this was untrue, so it’s not that Alonso is just making things as painful as possible for Honda. But he’s not sparing any blushes either - there was a radio message hoping a lap in which he lost several places on the straights was broadcast, and a big wave as the Cadillac of Valtteri Bottas drove past.
Alonso also poured some cold water on Honda’s belief it had improved its reliability situation. A double DNF in China was completed by Lance Stroll suffering a battery problem, despite Honda feeling its countermeasures had got those vibrations more under control.
“Some of the steps we did were achieved artificially,” Alonso revealed. “Just lowering the RPM of the engine and things like that, so everything vibrates less.”
And his retirement reason obviously made it clear that the chassis vibrations suffered by the drivers were worse than ever. - SMM
Hard reality of F1 is biting Audi
Q3 pace and points from the outset is a better start to F1 life from Audi than sceptics might've expected back when the rumours were that the incoming car giant wasn't making great use of its preparation years.
But the fact it's settled straight into the upper midfield in performance terms makes the things that are going wrong look more painful and conspicuous.
After Nico Hulkenberg's non-start in Australia, it was Gabriel Bortoleto's turn to sit out a grand prix this time. It's far from the only team failing to get out of the garage, but that's only a 50% success rate for actually turning up on the grid so far. See also its starts, which are routinely notably bad. A strategy miscue and poor pitstop stymied Hulkenberg's recovery from that at Shanghai.
That all leaves it equal on (two) points with Williams, which would be looking like it was having a disastrous start to F1's new era if Aston Martin wasn't redefining what that means.
Audi could be doing a lot worse but it's already let a lot of chances to do better slip by. - Matt Beer
Cadillac's upper limit revealed
Cadillac has now achieved something that Red Bull, McLaren, Audi and Aston Martin have failed to in 2026: get both cars to the finish in a grand prix.
Valtteri Bottas was a lapped 13th in China, with Sergio Perez two places behind him, as Cadillac earned a new best result in F1 on its second start.
This was an all-round more convincing performance from the team as while it is still painfully adrift of the real midfield, it looked genuinely quicker than the troubled Aston Martin team rather than just more reliable. In qualifying, a 5.2% deficit to the front in Australia was reduced to 3.6% in China.
It hints at Cadillac’s upper limit: on tracks without medium and high-speed corners that expose its aerodynamic deficiencies, a pretty reasonably balanced car makes Cadillac a respectable backmarker, even if it is still being kept at arm’s length from the next team.
What it really needs to get on top of are the reliability problems that made its weekend very untidy, even though it ended in an encouraging double finish. - SMM
Points drought break came with frustration
A streak of 510 days without a point was finally broken by Franco Colapinto at Shanghai, but the overwhelming post-race feeling was one of frustration for the Argentinian.
He made a strong start on the hard tyres and looked well-placed for a strong top 10 finish until the timing of the safety car for Stroll’s stoppage “killed my race”.
Colapinto could have survived that for a handful of points, but he collided with Esteban Ocon, having just emerged from the pits.
Ocon rightly took full responsibility for the collision, but it gave Colapinto significant floor damage and he ended up a frustrated 10th, behind a much slower Williams.
Team-mate Pierre Gasly did capitalise on Alpine’s much better weekend to claim sixth for the team, and this is still a first double points finish for the team since the miracle Brazil 2024 double podium, but Colapinto felt aggrieved nonetheless.
“I did all I could, pushed really hard,” he said after the race. “I should have got many more points than we had today.”
Perhaps more important than the result, though, is Colapinto’s rate of improvement through the weekend, which even prompted a hug from Flavio Briatore after narrowly missing out on Q3, and a post-race nod from Briatore to the “superb job” from “both drivers”. - JS
