Adam Cooper F1

A bold strategy call and a great third place for Lewis Hamilton and Scuderia Ferrari in Saturday’s Miami sprint was a welcome boost after their recent struggles.

It was also a sign that any wild suggestions of a premature end to their relationship are wide of the mark – Hamilton is not the kind of guy to give up on a challenge.

Speaking after the sprint chequered flag he admitted that there is still a long way to go.

“The fact is so far we’re not extracting everything,” he said. “I don’t think we’re extracting everything from the car, and that’s what we need to work on to extract the full potential of the car. I think we have good downforce.

“I don’t think we’re on the same pace as as in McLarens, but I think we we should be fighting a little bit closer, perhaps, to to the Bulls and to McLaren.

“So I think there’s a lot of elements that we need to elevate, and hopefully we’ll try and see if we can do that into into qualifying today. Definitely lots learned already so far.”

It’s not been an easy start to 2026 for Hamilton, and his regular assertion that he’s simply taking time to get used to a new car and team has been met with some scepticism.

However others who are going through the same process this year know exactly what he’s facing as he moves along the learning curve.

Carlos Sainz has noted since the start of the year that he’s been in the same situation, having done the opposite swap from Ferrari to Mercedes power units.

“I’m not surprised at all,” said the Spaniard when I asked him about Hamilton’s struggles.

“I think for me, I expected it to myself, and I expected it with him, because in this sport, there are no secrets. And when you are up against two team mates like we are, like Alex and Charles, that they know the team inside out, and they are already performing at the maximum that that car can perform.

“So you can only do just a little bit better or the same as them. You cannot suddenly arrive and be two three tenths quicker, because it’s not possible. They are already at the limit of the car.

“So when you jump to any team and you’re expected by yourself and by everyone around you to be at that level, you know it’s going to take time if there’s no secrets. They know a lot more than you, and it’s going to take a bit of time. And the sooner you make that process, and the sooner you are at that level, the better.

“But for some drivers, it might take longer or shorter. Lewis had an amazing weekend in China. Then he seemed to have a bit more trouble now. But it’s going to take time for both.”

So how long is it acceptable for a driver to take to make that transition?

“It’s a tricky question, because it depends,” said Sainz. “It depends how natural the car comes to you, depends how natural the relationship with engineers and that blend comes.

“I’ve always said that to know a car well, you need at least half a year to a year to experience everything with that car. That doesn’t mean that you cannot perform during that year. This is a different topic. You can perform at 100% or at 99, and your 99 might still be pretty good, but the 100% for sure, there’s things that you need for sure, half a year, I would say, to experience.

“And I’m not using it as an excuse. I want to perform like I did in Jeddah from race one, even if I am at 97 instead of 99. But it’s I just know it takes time, and I’m going to be demanding with myself.”

You could look at history and point out examples of drivers making a smooth transition and even winning their first races with new teams.

The fact is that the current ground effect cars are much trickier to drive at the limit than those of the past, and range of controls available to drivers far more complicated.

“These cars nowadays, I feel like you need to drive them in a very specific way to be quick,” said Sainz.

“I feel like the cars of ’21 you could come in with two or three different driving styles and more or less get the same lap time, because the car would allow you to get to that limit in different ways.

“I feel the more I get to drive this generation of cars, the more I dig into the data, the more I realise you need to be closed loop to one driving style. And if you don’t drive in that way, you’re never going to be quick.

“And it’s just how the car interacts with you, which allows you to drive in that specific way that you need to make sure you understand. I think these cars are particularly difficult.”

Esteban Ocon’s move from Alpine to Haas has been less high profile than those of Hamilton and Sainz, and he’s had some decent races and scored points. However he’s not had it easy either.

“It’s very difficult,” said the Frenchman when I asked him. “And especially when you change a car’s philosophy, because the Haas car and the Ferrari car have a lot of similarities, so I can relate a little bit to Lewis on that side, having driven the Merc as well in the past, it’s a very different way of driving the car – or extracting the potential of it. And the car feels very different.

“So it’s not easy, for sure, to adapt to that. I’m sure he will find a way very quickly. And in the meantime, I also have to improve quite a lot of things as well, still that I’m in a way of doing. It’s been five races, so things are getting more to normal. There’s more routine now going on, and how we prepare weekends, and how I feel I drive the car.

“I know straight away when something is not quite right, or where it should be compared to before, where I thought it was normality. So the more you drive, the more you learn. But there is at some point, you know, there is no adapting to it. You just have to deal with it.”

Ocon agrees with Sainz that the current ground effect cars are particularly difficult.

“For sure. I don’t think they are forgiving these cars at all, the way they are stiff, how they bounce. You know, how the tyres react. They are better these tyres, but they always tend to understeer quite a lot mid-corner.

“I don’t think there are two ways of driving it. You need to go with one way. There is no other direction that you can drive the car. You need to choose the quickest way, and that’s it.”

Ocon’s boss Ayao Komatsu has suggested that it’s easier for young drivers to adjust to the current cars than those with more knowledge. It’s a curious situation that life is harder for more experienced drivers.

“I think if you come from junior formulas and you go straight into that car you put everything that you’ve learned you know away and you just go into it,” said Ocon. “And you learn the new thing again.

“Now, with our experience, I mean, Lewis has much more experience than me, he’s driven a lot of different cars, but a lot of the same one as well for a long time. So I can understand why it’s not easy. And I know it’s also not easy for me, or for Carlos. But we’ll get there.”

McLaren F1 boss Zak Brown says the ‘Tire Water!’ drink bottle he displayed on the pit wall in Miami on Friday was a dig at Red Bull boss Christian Horner on what he calls the “serious issue” of teams making accusations about potential illegalities on rival cars.

In 2024 there were suggestions from the Red Bull camp that McLaren was using water in its tyres as a strategy for cooling.

Brown says he’s frustrated that teams can make allegations that cannot be backed up, but which potentially do damage to the accused.

He says that teams should make a formal protest, and that to ensure that they are not frivolous the fee should have a potential impact on the cost cap.

“My new water bottle, so that was poking fun in a serious issue, which is teams have historically made allegations of other teams,” he said. “Most recently, one team focuses on that strategy more than others.

“And I think that there’s a proper way to protest a team at the end of the race, and you have to make it formal, disclose where it comes from, you put some money down. I think that process should be extended to all allegations, to stop the frivolous allegations which are intended only to be a distraction.

“So if you had to put up some money and put on paper and not back channel, what your allegations are. I think that would be a way to clean up the bogus allegations that happen in this sport, which are not very sporting.

“And if someone does believe there’s a technical issue, by all means, you’re entitled to it. Put it on paper, put your money down. You should come against your cost cap if it turns out you’re wrong, and I think that will significantly stop the bogus allegations that come from some teams in the sport.”

Asked what sort of number the fee should be he said: “It needs to be meaningful from a I’m choosing to spend money on that instead of my own racing car. We’re all right at the limit of the budget cap.

“I know how much we will not waste a dollar on anything that we don’t think brings performance. So it’s probably 25 grand.

“If it was kind of would I spend 25 grand on a distraction tactic or development of my own race car, I’d spend 25 grand on my race car all day long. So it doesn’t need to be hundreds of thousands, but it needs to be meaningful enough that you’re taking away performance you’re spending on your car.”

When Lando Norris met the media in Jeddah not long after his heavy Q3 crash he was surprisingly calm and collected, given the obvious blow to his title hopes associated with a P10 start.

If anything he was less stressed that he had been exactly a week earlier in Bahrain, when he made his frustration at qualifying only sixth very obvious.

On this occasion crucially he’d already had an opportunity to speak to his team, and his own subsequent approach mirrored theirs – yes the crash wasn’t ideal, but let’s think about how do we turn this around in Sunday’s race?

It’s a positive approach that has been fostered by team principal and accomplished man manager Andrea Stella.

His engineer’s instincts kicked in – let’s deal with the challenge we now have – while at the same time helping to ensure that Norris himself quickly moved on.

“When you have an incident in qualifying, it’s always unfortunate,” said the Italian. “Because like today, Lando could have been the first row, and now we are starting from 10th.

“But these guys are race drivers, they have done this their entire life. I’m sure it’s not the only disappointing Saturday that Lando might have had in his career. We are all, drivers included, very thick skinned. Very used to that, very determined.

“In the briefing our focus immediately shifted onto what tyres for tomorrow? How do we try to use the performance that we are showing on Friday?

“It’s not only a morale aspect, it’s also almost a methodological aspect, like how do I move from this point into good? There’s a race tomorrow, let’s be programmed, let’s go and actually use this disappointment as additional determination.

“That was the conversation in the briefing, if you want. That’s the sport. And I think when you are into the sport, when you are the athlete or the engineers, you are well-trained, and sometimes you just have these five minutes of disappointment, and then you know how to convert it. This is what I’ve seen has happened with Lando and also with the team.”

Asked about his friend’s incident Carlos Sainz suggested that he could bounce back, citing last year’s Brazilian GP – when the fortunes of Norris and Max Verstappen were reversed – as an example of how quickly things can change between a Saturday and Sunday.

When I asked Stella if the circumstances now gave Norris a chance to turn things around on Sunday and show what he’s made of he agreed.

“One hundred per cent,” he said. “After five minutes, Lando was here, back in the office. Immediately, the mindset changed. That’s not the position that we want to be in a race in which we could have started from the front row.

“But actually, we take it as an opportunity to show our determination, to show the strength from our attitudinal point of view, in terms of our mindset. This was very much what we talked about in the debrief, post-qualifying and also the genuine attitude that everyone brought into the debriefing and into preparing and positioning the team for having a good race tomorrow.

“I really hope that we will be in condition to have some free laps, free air laps tomorrow, use the pace that we saw on Friday, and this weekend could actually be a weekend from which we come out stronger, reinforced, even more confident, because we see our strengths. And I think this aspect of the qualifying is very episodical.

“We just have to sort of understand how to deal with the fact that perhaps sometimes you just don’t have to go for the final few milliseconds until we make the car just more genuine in terms of the cueing and the feedback that the car gives to the drivers, this is 100% responsibility of the team.”

To his credit Stella also suggested that the team takes responsibility for putting Norris in a position where mistakes can happen at the very limit.

That’s an impressive attitude to adopt, especially when your driver hits a low like Lando did on Saturday evening.

Stella explained: “I think in Q3 when Lando tries to squeeze a few more milliseconds out of the car, what we see – and I think we are starting to see this even better in the in the data, like in terms of identification of what is going on – when he tries to squeeze this extra millisecond, just the car doesn’t respond as he expects.

“So I think this is a behaviour that kind of surprises him. Today it surprised him. The car understeered a bit in corner four, ended up on the outside kerb, and this outside kerb can be quite unforgiving.

“So in a way, it’s almost episodical. What’s happening is an episode, and it’s an episode that I think starts from some of the work that we have done on the car. It made the car faster overall, but I think it took something away from Lando in terms of predictability of the car once he pushes the car at the limit.

“So it’s a responsibility of the team to try and improve the car and to try and correct this behaviour, because we want Lando to be confident, comfortable that he can push the car.

“And when he needs to find a few milliseconds, he can do it with a behaviour of the car that, okay, maybe you realise I pushed a bit too much, but without this sort of macroscopic consequences. So I see very much of a responsibility of the team in terms of improving the situation.”

Stela acknowledged that it might take time to hone the car, and in the interim the key is to ensure that Norris is able to cope as best he can.

“What’s important from Lando’s side is that in the meantime, while we don’t improve it, he maintains the confidence and he maintains an availability to adapt. These cars are so fast, they are so demanding in terms of just adopting a very natural driving style.

“We hear this even from Hamilton, seven times world champion, and yet, he talks about driving the car in a natural way, because these cars are too fast to think. You either kind of get what you anticipate from the car, or you’re going to be slow.

“And Lando doesn’t accept to be slow. So it’s our responsibility to make sure that we give him a car that is at the level of his talent.”

[If you’re an outlet that can use stories like the above do get in touch as I am available for work!]

Perhaps the most unexpected performance of the Bahrain GP weekend was fifth place in qualifying for Pierre Gasly and Alpine, which later became fourth on the grid after Kimi Antonelli was penalised.

Hitherto the team’s best one-lap performance of the season was Gasly’s ninth in Australia, and in China neither driver even made it out of Q1. In the race there Gasly lost the chance to move from 11^th to ninth in the final results when the two Mercedes drivers were disqualified when he was himself excluded for skid wear.

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With no points on the board after three events and the team firmly last in the World Championship the pressure was mounting. Gasly was able to put that that right with a strong drive in the Bahrain race.

However he was still in sixth and holding off Max Verstappen until losing out to the World Champion on the very last lap. It was frustrating for the Frenchman, but six points was still a decent haul.

“Crossing the line was kind of like a mixed feeling,” he said when I asked him about losing out. “Because I absolutely hate losing a position in the last lap, especially after having to work so hard, like over the last 20 laps, trying to keep Max at bay.

“So yeah, it’s always frustrating. But I think on the other side, once the adrenaline is going to calm down a bit, looking back last week, we were not even fighting for the top 10, and Max was winning the race.

“So it just shows how much of a good weekend we’ve had as a team. The car was competitive, quali was amazing, the race was great. Good strategy, good pit stops, and even with that unlucky timing with the safety car, where we lost the position to Lewis, in the end still a lot of positives to take.”

Gasly admitted that the timing of the safety car was annoying, especially given that it was dispatched for debris rather than anything more serious.

“When I saw for what it was… I’m sure we’re going to talk about it. At that time, I had a nice gap on Max, I had a nice gap on Lewis and the guys around. And it’s like, we worked all the race, and now for a few bits of carbon – actually, I think, if I’m not wrong, Yuki had a contact, and it actually gave him a 10-second reduction on his pit stop time. So it was a nice gain for some guys!

“Ultimately, that’s racing, we’ve got to get on with it, and that’s the way it is. Even though it didn’t all come our way, we still managed to finish that race in P7, and score our first points of the season, which is very positive.”

It was made even sweeter by the change in form since Bahrain 2025, which admittedly was a little earlier in the season as the opening race.

“Last year, I must say, it was kind of like hitting rock bottom, both cars 19 and 20,” said Gasly. “And I think Max probably lapped us after half race last year. So a very different picture, 12 months later, we were fighting with him until the last lap.

“I’m very pleased, and always the effort the team is putting in, and just the performance we’re able to extract.

“We know where the current weakness is, we know there is some work to do in the car, like some areas which don’t quite click, like low-speed, traction, all this stuff, are areas we need to improve.

“But the overall performance of the car is massively improved. And just thanks to all the great work people are doing at the factory.”

The weaknesses may be apparent, but Gasly admits that he doesn’t know if the Bahrain form will translate to this weekend in Jeddah and beyond.

“I want to believe so, the reality is I’ve absolutely got no idea,” he said. “We did the winter test here. The car felt really good. I think we definitely had quite high expectations going into the season. Australia, I think we were competitive, but China and Suzuka was a lot more difficult.

“So I think it’s important for us to understand where the performance came from this weekend. And I’m sure we’ll be able to repeat on some of the tracks, but hopefully we can just get it more consistently.

“I want to believe that we can be competitive, like when you finish P7 and qualify P5 it obviously boosts your confidence.

“I think we will have to get some answers on why we were so competitive this weekend. But I’m having a lot more fun fighting with Max than fighting more towards the back…”

Points came as a relief for the Alpine management as well. This is not a team that can afford to be at the bottom of the table.

“I think we needed it,” said team principal Oliver Oakes. “It’s not lost on me that you flick on a TV, and you see your zero at the bottom.

“That just piles a bit of pressure on. We know we’ve got a pretty good car. We know this is a bit of a transition year for us as well, into ’26 not just new regs, but obviously on the PU side.

“The main thing as well the start of this year, I think we feel we’ve got a pretty good group there, the strategy has been good, the way we’re working in the team.

“And I think it was a question of when not if. We knew we’d get some points, I think Australia to walk away empty-handed there was a little bit annoying, because we’d sort of been in the mix the whole race. So this is just nice to sort of get started a little bit.”

Like Gasly Oakes admitted it wasn’t easy to pinpoint why the car was good in Bahrain, especially as there have been no upgrades of late.

“I think in fairness it’s a little bit the swings of F1. Australia, we were pretty competitive. Obviously, we walked away empty-handed with the rain and all the trials and tribulations. China was just a little bit difficult for us.

“And I think Japan, we were pretty okay. It was just one of those races where you qualify, and it was kind of processional. It’s clear to see a track like this suits us a little bit. I think that’s kind of normal in F1, you have some places you’re stronger, some you’re not.”

“It’s the same car. Obviously you learn more as you start running a car on different tracks, different conditions. I just think it’s really tight as well. I think whether that’s getting out of Q1 even, you sort of go, there’s not much in it.

“What was nice in the race really was I think we felt we could hold our own. I think it’s hard on different compounds. You can see that some suit some cars, not others. And you’ve got to focus on yourself as well.”

How the car fares on upcoming tracks remains to be seen.

“I think genuinely the car is performing,” said Oakes. “We’ve only done four races with a new car. You’re learning every week, not just how to set up the car, but also some weekends, whether it’s got a sprint mixed in as well, make it harder to put the car in the right place.”