Formula 1 raced in China this past weekend, just a week after the sport kicked off its 2026 season in Australia. Most of the teams had a better handle on the sport’s complicated new cars in China, and the more traditional racetrack environment played better to the strengths of their hybrid power units, with enough hard braking zones to recharge batteries without having to sap engine power instead.
We have a better idea of the grid’s current pecking order, at least for now. There’s some daylight between each of the top three teams and a close battle for midfield honors. Meanwhile, the specter of unreliability is well and truly with us; four cars failed to even take the start, and seven (of 22) were not classified as finishing. For fans of those teams and drivers, it wasn’t a great weekend, especially if you woke up at 3 am to watch the race. But F1 put generally on an entertaining show in Shanghai.
That’s a lot of fans
The sport has been visiting the city since 2004. The setting is a classic turn-of-the-century facility designed and built by Herman Tilke. It’s a captivating-looking place, with a pond-filled paddock, a vast grandstand that spans the start-finish straight, and a layout that resembles the character for “shang,” which creates some rather tricky corners, like the spiraling decreasing radii of turns 1 and 2.
Over the years, the city of Shanghai—once visible on the distant horizon—has grown closer and closer to the race track. And for most of those years, I’ve noticed that the grandstands just before the back straight were never in use until this year.
“…This is the biggest crowd I’ve ever seen here in Shanghai,” said Lewis Hamilton in the post-race press conference. “When we were doing the drivers’ parade, we went up to Turn 11, 12, and that grandstand has been closed for, I think, almost 20 years, and it was amazing. I was so shocked to see it completely full.”
Indeed, a new concrete grandstand structure replaced the old stands which were always covered with hoardings. And it was completely full, as were the rest of them, with others lining the general admission banks. If you were confused by the recent rumors linking Chinese automaker BYD to the sport, the sold-out crowd this year should help make it make more sense.
A maiden win is pretty cool
This was F1’s first sprint weekend of the year, meaning there was just one practice session instead of the usual three. Mercedes remains faster than anyone else by a considerable enough margin that, without some very hard work by some of the other teams, the drivers’ and constructors’ championships will almost certainly be Mercedes’. The car makes its speed along the straights, as in 2014, and the last new hybrid power units, Mercedes’ High Performance Powertrains, simply did a better job than any other system. The company’s factory team has a far better understanding of how to exploit the V6/electric motor/battery pack combo than any of its customer teams.
Ferrari remains Mercedes’ closest rival, perhaps half a second down over a lap. The red car is quicker through the corners, and the wisdom of Ferrari’s decision to go for smaller, faster spooling turbochargers was in evidence at both starts as Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc mixed it with the Mercedes of George Russell and Kimi Antonelli.
Antonelli’s sprint went awry with a bad start, then avoidable contact with the Red Bull of Isack Hadjar, leaving Russell to share his victory podium with Leclerc and Hamilton. Sunday went a lot better—Antonelli had qualified on pole the day before, and unlike in the sprint, he got his Mercedes moving quickly when the lights went out, staying ahead of his more experienced English teammate.
A better start from Hamilton saw the seven-time champion pass both Mercedes—something that must have felt a little sweet after essentially being ousted from that team in favor of the teenage Antonelli at the start of last year. Before lap three, the teenager was back in the lead, a position he would not relinquish until the checkered flag, taking his debut win and becoming the second-youngest F1 winner in history (after Max Verstappen).
“The start is still our weak point, and to be fair, I didn’t go with great confidence because my two previous starts were really bad, so I didn’t know what to expect,” Antonelli said after the race. “But obviously, I covered a little bit too much on the inside and left too much space on the outside, so probably need to review that. But pace was still good, especially I felt good on the Hards, even though at the end I relaxed a bit too much and did a mistake which put a bit of pressure. But still managed to bring it home.”
For many laps, we were treated to a magnificent duel between Hamilton and Leclerc in their evenly matched Ferraris. Hamilton already has six wins in Shanghai and is among the drivers who loves the circuit. This showed as he gapped Leclerc and held onto the final podium position. In the post-race press conference, after congratulating Antonelli, he sounded happier than we’ve heard in at least a year.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do to try and keep up, but I had so much fun. We had a great start. I wasn’t able to keep these guys behind, but to stay in the fight is one of the most enjoyable races I’ve had in a long, long time, if ever. The fact that the cars are the way they are this year, and that battle with Charles at the end, was awesome. Great wheel-to-wheel battle, very fair and just what we want,” Hamilton told journalists.
DNS, DNF
There were fewer smiles at the other end of the time sheet. Four cars failed to even take the start of Sunday’s race, including both McLarens, the Audi of Gabriel Bortoleto, and the Williams of Alex Albon, all experiencing last-minute technical failures. Three more would fail to finish: both Aston Martins and the Red Bull of Max Verstappen. We’ve looked at the ongoing reliability problems at Aston Martin recently, and as in Australia, Verstappen made dreadful starts in both the sprint and Grand Prix.
Making matters worse, the Red Bull team seems closer in pace to the midfield teams than the leading three teams, and Verstappen was behind the Haas of Oliver Bearman and looked set to finish there in sixth place until a problem with the hybrid’s cooling forced his retirement. The four-time champion remains vocal about his distate for the new format, and this weekend will have done nothing to change that.
I wonder if history is starting to rhyme a little? Multiple champion Sebastian Vettel never really clicked with the hybrids introduced in 2014, and multiple champion Hamilton similarly never got comfortable with the ground effect cars of 2022–2025. Could it be that multiple champion Verstappen just won’t gel with the 53:47 split hybrids?
His Red Bull team and the other 10 teams on the grid will be working flat out as the cost cap and regulations allow them to improve their cars. More downforce, less drag, a reduction in mass, an improvement in power output—all these things and more are on the menu. The next race, in Japan in two weeks, is probably too soon to expect any upgrades, and the teams will now have all of April to work on that back at their respective bases; the ongoing conflict in the Middle East has forced the cancellation of the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grands Prix, with no replacements being arranged.
That means we should see new parts in Miami. And perhaps a tweak to qualifying, with deployment from the electric motor limited in this mode so the electric motor can be used for more of the lap.
