Miami was supposed to be a coronation for McLaren after Lando Norris topped Saturday's sprint. Instead, a three-hour weather delay, a lap-6 pile-up that triggered the safety car, and a Ferrari meltdown on the final lap turned the Miami International Autodrome into one of 2026's most chaotic afternoons — and handed Kimi Antonelli his third straight victory from pole, a feat that puts the rookie-turned-star in company with Damon Hill and Mika Häkkinen.

A quick note on how we're covering this one: our pre-race forecasts for Miami didn't pan out the way we hoped. Rather than pretend shaky numbers tell you something meaningful, we're focusing on what actually happened at the Autodrome and, crucially, why — team by team, using what drivers, engineers and team bosses said afterward.

Mercedes

Kimi Antonelli's win was the headline, and deservedly so. He converted his third consecutive pole into a lights-to-flag masterclass, surviving a physical three-way scrap into Turn 1 with Verstappen and Leclerc before out-strategizing McLaren with a perfectly timed undercut that Norris simply couldn't answer. It's the kind of composed, race-craft-heavy victory that makes his run of three straight wins feel like far more than a hot streak. His teammate's weekend told a very different story: George Russell was off the pace all weekend and owned it — "clearly an outlier weekend for me" — only rescuing a respectable P4 with a couple of gutsy late passes on Verstappen and Leclerc. Same car, wildly different weekends, which is its own reminder of how razor-thin the margins are on a chaotic Miami Sunday.

McLaren

McLaren arrived with the form and left with regret. Norris beat both Piastri and Leclerc in Saturday's sprint and looked every bit the favourite for Sunday, but a pit call that came one lap later than Mercedes' stop for Antonelli opened the door to the undercut that decided the race. Team principal Andrea Stella was candid afterward, chalking the defeat up to "execution and optimisation" rather than raw pace — which stings more than a straightforward beating on track. Still, a 2-3 finish for Norris and Piastri is a strong points haul and keeps McLaren's championship math healthy even without the win they arguably deserved.

Red Bull

Verstappen turned Miami's mid-race chaos to his advantage, pitting early under the safety car triggered by the Gasly/Lawson/Hadjar incidents and comfortably banking P5 despite a five-second penalty for clipping the pit-exit line — the punishment cost him nothing position-wise. It's a tidy, opportunistic result from a driver who continues to make the most of messy sessions. Ayumu Hadjar's weekend, by contrast, was one to forget: disqualified from qualifying for a technical infringement that forced him to start from the pit lane, he was then one of the cars caught in the Turn 17 accident that ended his afternoon and brought out the safety car that reshaped everyone else's race.

Ferrari

This was Ferrari's race to lose, and Charles Leclerc lost it in agonising fashion. Running third late on, he was passed by Piastri, spun trying to respond at Turn 3 on the final lap, then limped the damaged car home and picked up repeated track-limits violations that became a 20-second penalty — dropping him from a podium-adjacent sixth all the way to eighth. He didn't hide from it afterward, saying it was "all on me," though he's since pushed the team to investigate a mysterious late-race pace drop-off that may have started the unravelling. Lewis Hamilton's day was almost the mirror image: he absorbed first-lap contact with Colapinto and nursed the car home to sixth, a result that only looked better once his teammate's penalty landed. A weekend that promised a Ferrari podium instead delivered damage limitation sixth and a demoted eighth.

Alpine

A genuinely split-screen day for Alpine. Franco Colapinto delivered his best result of the season, seventh and in the points, shrugging off first-lap contact with Hamilton to drive a clean, composed race to the flag. Pierre Gasly wasn't so lucky — his race ended violently on lap 6 when Lawson's Racing Bulls car, suffering a gearbox failure, speared into him at Turn 17 and flipped his Alpine into the barrier. Gasly walked away unhurt, but the incident was the catalyst for the safety car that reshaped the entire race, meaning Alpine's afternoon mattered to everyone on the grid, not just themselves.

Williams

Williams' story was all about the car, not just the drivers. A weight-reduction upgrade — addressing a chassis that had been running overweight since a delayed winter build — finally paid off with the team's first double-points finish of the season: Carlos Sainz ninth, Alex Albon tenth for his first point of 2026 after missing the start in three of the opening races. It's a tangible sign the upgrade direction is working, even if Sainz voiced frustration that the team should be delivering more given the pace on show, and there was visible team-order tension between the two late in the race as Williams managed the result.

Haas

A quietly solid team weekend for Haas, built on strategy rather than dramatics. Both Oliver Bearman and Esteban Ocon started on mediums and benefited from the safety car sparked by the Gasly/Hadjar incidents; Bearman pitted for hards on lap 26 and held eleventh to the flag, while Ocon's later stop on lap 31 left him exposed late on, ultimately losing a place to Bortoleto's Audi and finishing thirteenth. No fireworks, no points, but a clean, sensible weekend that kept both cars out of trouble amid the chaos around them.

Audi

Miami was miserable for Audi almost from the start. Nico Hulkenberg's car caught fire on the installation lap before the sprint due to a power-unit leak, ruling him out entirely — the third Audi non-start from an engine problem in just five events this season, a reliability pattern the team can't keep brushing aside. Gabriel Bortoleto then had his own nightmare: disqualified from the sprint for a technical infringement on intake air pressure (which Audi blamed on a temperature spike), followed by a gearbox change, a brake-fire scare, and an overheating engine in the main race before he salvaged twelfth. A weekend that raises real reliability questions heading into the next round.

Racing Bulls

A pointless weekend that could have been much worse. Liam Lawson's race ended on lap 6 when a gearbox failure meant he couldn't brake in time at Turn 17, collecting Gasly's Alpine and flipping it into the barrier — Lawson himself retired on the spot. Arvid Lindblad's weekend had already been compromised by a car-covering infringement that cost him his sprint qualifying position and forced a pit-lane start in the main race; he came home fourteenth. Between a mechanical failure that triggered a race-defining safety car and a self-inflicted grid penalty, there's little to salvage from Miami for this team.

Aston Martin

The story here isn't the finishing positions — Fernando Alonso fifteenth, Lance Stroll seventeenth — it's that both cars actually made it to the chequered flag, the first time that's happened for Aston Martin all season. That's a real marker of progress after the AMR26's power-unit troubles earlier in the year, even if Alonso was quick to flag a new gearbox concern as the next item on the reliability to-do list. Modest results, but a weekend Aston Martin will call a step forward rather than a setback.

Cadillac

Cadillac's first-ever home race came with a special livery and a genuine strategic subplot: a new upgrade package aimed at closing the midfield gap. The team banked its third consecutive double finish, with Sergio Perez sixteenth and Valtteri Bottas eighteenth, but a drive-through penalty for Bottas and some inconsistency from the new parts took some of the shine off what should have been a celebratory weekend on home soil. Progress, but not yet a breakthrough.

Final Takeaways

The overriding storyline from Miami is that chaos rewarded composure. Antonelli's third straight win cements him as the form driver of this stretch of the season, built on ice-cool execution rather than outright car superiority — Mercedes didn't obviously have the fastest package, but they nailed the moments that mattered while McLaren, by their own admission, didn't. Leclerc's late unravelling was the day's biggest gut-punch for a title-chasing team, turning a likely podium into damage limitation and opening an internal investigation into Ferrari's late-race pace. Elsewhere, the lap-6 pile-up involving Gasly, Lawson and Hadjar was the pivot point for half the grid's strategy, a reminder that in modern F1 a single mechanical failure can rewrite everyone else's afternoon. And beneath the podium fight, Williams' weight-saving upgrade and Aston Martin's first double finish of the year are the kind of quiet, incremental stories that matter just as much over a full season as who wins on a Sunday.