Former Formula 1 engineer Rob Smedley has raised concerns that Ferrari’s upgrades for the Miami Grand Prix are “slightly soul-destroying,” as McLaren appears to have extracted greater performance improvements from its own package.
Despite a promising start to 2026, including Lewis Hamilton’s first podium with Ferrari at the Chinese Grand Prix, McLaren leapfrogged in competitiveness at the Miami GP with both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri finishing second and third. The gap between Ferrari and McLaren has now shrunk to just 16 points, putting significant pressure on Fred Vasseur’s team.
Charles Leclerc, Ferrari, Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari
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Speaking on the *High Performance Racing* podcast alongside former Alpine team principal Otmar Szafnauer, Smedley highlighted the danger of entering a “negative loop” when upgrades fail to deliver.
“Absolutely,” Smedley said when asked if losing ground to McLaren after introducing upgrades would be a major disappointment. “It’s slightly soul-destroying because it starts from a technical standpoint. You essentially enter this negative loop where you have to dissect the whole process—what you brought, what works, and what doesn’t.
“If the correlation between wind tunnel or simulation tools and on-track performance is off, you’re forced into a reverse-engineering cycle that consumes time and halts development you should be doing.”
Charles Leclerc, Ferrari, Lando Norris, McLaren
Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images
Szafnauer echoed Smedley’s concerns, explaining how correlation issues drain resources. “There are two things at play. You have limited resources, so instead of making the car faster, you’re spending them on fixing correlation issues. If that’s the problem, you must fix it before anything else. But the same engineers responsible for on-track performance get pulled into correlation work.”
Szafnauer noted that teams like his former outfit at Aston Martin and Racing Point had dedicated aeroperformance groups (APG) to handle correlation tasks. “When I joined Alpine, they had only three people in APG. If correlation is perfect, that’s fine. But if you wake up one day and it’s not, with just three people you’re going to struggle. Then your aerodynamicists are working on correlation instead of making the car faster—and that’s a real problem.”
The widening performance gap underscores Ferrari’s urgent need to ensure its next round of upgrades translates into tangible lap-time improvements, or risk losing its slim championship lead.