Winners and losers from F1 2026 Miami sprint qualifying
Formula 1's first competitive session for almost five weeks threw up plenty of surprise and intrigue, as well as McLaren's first 'pole' of 2026.
Here's our pick of the stars and flops from Miami sprint qualifying.
Loser: Mercedes (2nd & 6th)
A first defeat of the season in a competitive session for Mercedes has to go down as a loss, even though championship leader Kimi Antonelli made the front row.
It would seem the double whammy of rule changes designed to reduce reliance on extreme electrical energy recharge and deployment tactics, plus other teams bringing major upgrades while Mercedes defers, has suddenly put F1's dominant team under pressure.
George Russell was well down the order and complaining of a lack of grip and car balance, as well as expressing surprise at how much progress rivals have made.
A comparison of Lando Norris's (at times scruffy) pole lap versus a relatively cleaner run from Antonelli, suggests nearly all the Mercedes time loss came through a slightly understeery run through Turn 1 and then a lack of pace through the high-speed sweeps thereafter.
Probably McLaren has closed the gap in terms of pure grip and downforce with that upgrade, but the speed traces also suggest - as in Suzuka - an initial divergence in terms of energy deployment strategy that seems to have once again given McLaren a Friday edge.
The question now is whether it persists or (as in Suzuka) Mercedes manages to reassert itself. - Ben Anderson
Winner: Max Verstappen (5th)
It's still nowhere near where he wants or expects to be, but this is comfortably the closest Verstappen has been to the pace so far this season.
Red Bull looks to have made a similar trade-off with deployment as Mercedes, so gaining on the runs to Turns 11 and 17 is offset against McLaren's superior speed heading to Turn 1 and between Turns 3 and 4.
The rest of that near-0.6s gap looks to be from the inferior speed Verstappen can carry through the corners. He loses a big chunk from Turns 4-8 and another whack though the fiddly bit of Turns 11-16.
As he indicated afterwards, the Red Bull is feeling "more together" and "I can trust it a bit more", but it still likely lacks the pin-sharp rotation (while retaining rear grip) that allows Verstappen to do his best work.
Nevertheless, in the context of an awful season so far, which has been driving him towards considering an early exit, this is at least a step in the right direction. - BA
Loser: Isack Hadjar (9th)
Hadjar made it into the top 10 yet again - but there the positives end. This was Hadjar's worst qualifying of the season, and even if it's 'only' for the sprint, he was clearly annoyed and baffled by it afterwards.
"To be a second off [Verstappen], I don't know why - I've never been more than a tenth off so far this year when it mattered," he said. "So, I don't know what's going on."
And his mardiness was further evidenced when, in response to being asked about working with the team to find the missing time/reason, he replied: "Yeah, because I know I can drive."
It is obviously too early to declare this a case of Hadjar failing to adjust to an upgraded Red Bull like his predecessors have done previously, but it is an unfortunate correlation.
And it's the sense of confusion, along with being so far off he's sandwiched by the Alpines, that makes this such a disappointing result. - Scott Mitchell-Malm
Winner: Kimi Antonelli (2nd)
With every passing session it feels like Antonelli's momentum is building, and while he didn't take pole in Miami, he thoroughly had the beating of his team-mate Russell, which in itself is a very strong achievement.
A mighty late flying lap that had McLaren worried - especially with the fastest final sector - might have failed, but the beating of his struggling team-mate in itself is a big enough win to outweigh that disappointment.
The McLaren has made a big step, the Ferrari and even Red Bull to a lesser extent appears to have too, and we know the Mercedes is a) not good off the startline and b) doesn't work as well in traffic. So Antonelli's bigger challenge will be figuring out how to bring Mercedes back to the top of the order.
But the fact he and not Russell is the driver best-placed to do that speaks volumes about Antonelli's ongoing progress. - Jack Benyon
Loser: Ferrari (4th & 7th)
Fastest in free practice, second fastest in SQ1 (only 0.010s away from the top) and fastest again in SQ2 (by nearly two tenths), Charles Leclerc was looking like the guy who was going to topple Mercedes in Miami.
But then Ferrari fitted the soft tyres for SQ3 (as mandated in the regulations) and suddenly that pace advantage evaporated.
Leclerc's 0.173s advantage over Oscar Piastri on medium Pirellis in SQ2 became a 0.370s deficit to Norris in SQ3. Lewis Hamilton was seven tenths off the pace and behind Verstappen's Red Bull to boot.
Given the pattern of the season so far, with Mercedes stumbling you would have expected Ferrari to be the team stepping into the breach - but instead it's McLaren in the ascendency and Ferrari left scratching their collective heads (again) as to why the car can't get the Pirelli tyres working as expected. - BA
Loser: Aston Martin (21st & 22nd)
Aston Martin continued to prop up the order on a day where its best recorded laptime in sprint qualifying was slower than the worst F2 qualifying lap - and that series has never even been to Miami before.
That made Aston Martin junior driver Mari Boya the team's fastest pilot of the day. What a quiz question that will make in a few years' time...
Fernando Alonso was over 10 seconds slower than the next slowest car, Valtteri Bottas’s Cadillac, thanks to exceeding track limits in SQ1. Alonso's best recorded lap - a 1m32.490s - wouldn't have placed him any better than 21st had it actually counted.
Lance Stroll didn't even set a time as he briefly stopped in the Turn 16 runoff after a big lock-up, and then returned to the pits with apparent brake issues.
In a year full of rock-bottom moments, it feels like Aston Martin just fell through a trap door in Miami. A scruffy day for all involved. - JB
Winner: McLaren (1st & 3rd)
McLaren's been fast so far this season, just not this impressively so. And the hints were there in Friday's elongated FP1 session that it was just as fast as Ferrari in Miami, it just didn't get the chance to show it when it mattered.
That's all to say this isn't the shock, bolt-from-the-blue pole position for Norris and McLaren that it could be interpreted as.
Yet it does feel like a significant step in the context of McLaren's admission it was behind the curve, aero-wise, and in the bigger-picture context of the first qualifying defeat of the season of its engine supplier, Mercedes.
Considering the deficit it had in Australia and China, this result - and the fact that level of performance was broadly achievable for both Norris and Piastri - lends more credence to the idea that McLaren is F1's preeminent team right now when it comes to car development. - Jack Cozens
Winner: Franco Colapinto (8th)
Fresh from wowing around 600,000 fans in Buenos Aires with an Alpine showrun, Colapinto bounced into Miami and finally out-qualified Pierre Gasly.
Gasly bemoaned his car and said the truncated sprint weekend format hadn't allowed the team enough time to diagnose some problems "on my side" - relating especially to wheelspin.
For Colapinto this could represent a turning point. He said the team is finally starting to understand where and why he has been lacking pace relative to Gasly up until now.
Beating Gasly by a tenth and a half here, given the form Gasly's been in, will surely give Colapinto a massive boost of confidence. - JB
Loser: Williams (14th & 19th)
From the classification Williams's session didn't look too bad, but scratch at the surface and this was not an ideal day at all.
Both cars, complete with many upgrades, did make it through to SQ2. But Carlos Sainz blasted his Williams team for being "three steps behind" on its execution, and lamented energy-deployment issues for halting any chance of an SQ3 push.
Alex Albon said he was happy with the progress on the car and it felt like a genuine, deserved SQ2 appearance. But then it turned out he exceeded track limits on his best SQ1 lap and shouldn't have been in SQ2 at all.
Bad news at the time for Liam Lawson, who sat in his Racing Bulls in vain hope of participating, but even worse news for Albon subsequently - he'll drop to 19th on the grid for Saturday's sprint. - JB
Loser: Racing Bulls (16th & 17th)
The Racing Bulls has looked like an extremely unfriendly car under braking on Friday and that translated into a poor sprint qualifying performance.
Lawson was eliminated in SQ1 - although the team briefly thought there might be a reprieve if Albon was punished for a track limits offence, as he subsequently was post-session - and while Arvid Lindblad got into SQ2, he was a distant slowest in that session.
Big lock-ups all through FP1 and sprint qualifying point squarely to where its main limitation seems to be here. - SMM
Winner: Sergio Perez (19th)
As Perez himself noted after sprint qualifying, "at some points we looked like we were going to make it to SQ2". Who genuinely thought anyone would be saying that on only Cadillac's fourth race weekend?
This entry does carry an asterisk, and that's down to the fact that the team's operations might have played a part in that missed opportunity. Perez said of the "issues" that he'd experienced: "Basically we went out too late, and then we just didn't have enough time for refuelling and [to] go back [out] again."
Still, a near-six-tenth advantage over Valtteri Bottas (that was consistent with his edge in FP1) is nothing to be sniffed at, nor is recording that after losing time to "issues with the engine" in practice.
It's Perez who's shown it, but that turn of pace is an auspicious early statement about the job Cadillac's done with its first-ever F1 upgrade package, too. - JC
