Toto Wolff's verdict on the Miami Grand Prix was that anyone complaining about the racing should hide, because in his view it would be such an outrageous position to hold. The Mercedes team principal got the win and the rookie title contender. He could afford the line.
The trouble for Wolff and the FIA is that the line cannot resolve the underlying argument about the 2026 rules. Miami delivered a clean, watchable race. It also did so on exactly the kind of circuit on which the new regulations were always going to look their best. Which means the most awkward conversation about 2026 is still ahead.
Miami is an energy-rich layout. Its stop-start sequence offers plentiful opportunities to recharge the battery under conventional braking. Even with the more restrictive deployment limits the FIA imposed in the surprise April adjustment, the cars in Florida were being driven more or less normally — with hardly any extreme lifting and coasting and almost none of the so-called super-clipping where the MGU-K is run in reverse to charge the battery under full throttle.
That improved on-track behaviour was the headline that Wolff and the FIA wanted. It is also a real step. What it does not do is change the architecture of the 2026 power unit. The cars still rely on a near 50/50 split of combustion and electrical power. F1's analysts have been blunt about the maths: at energy-poor circuits, that split simply cannot propel current cars around a lap efficiently enough.
Canada is the next race. Montreal is fundamentally different — long straights, heavy braking zones that cannot feed enough energy back to support the deployment the rules want. The same cars that looked normal in Miami will be back to clipping and coasting on the longer pulls. Monza, Las Vegas and the Red Bull Ring sit in the same energy-poor camp later in the year.
Max Verstappen continues to be the most vocal critic of the regulations. Miami's upgraded Red Bull made him noticeably happier in the cockpit. It did not change his view on the rules. He continues to argue that the underlying concept of the 2026 power unit is wrong for the racing F1 wants.
Carlos Sainz has been similarly forthright. He felt things were a bit better in Miami, but his criticism has consistently been about how the energy management element is shaping racing, not about one-off symptoms at one race. His prediction has been that the next group of circuits will surface the same complaints all over again.
The context here matters. The FIA's April changes — more power per super-clip use, a maximum recharge limit reduced from 8 to 7 megajoules, a less powerful boost mode and tighter wet-weather safety provisions — were emergency tweaks, not a redesign. They softened the worst symptoms. They did not change how the new power units have to be deployed lap to lap.
That is why Canada is the more important data point. Mercedes will arrive there with its first proper 2026 upgrade. McLaren, Ferrari and Red Bull will have had two more weeks to digest what Miami exposed. And the circuit itself will tell the FIA, and the rest of the paddock, whether the 2026 rules are actually fixed or simply quieter when the geography is friendly.
Miami was the best case. The hard cases start now.
This is a reworded write-up of analysis published originally at newsformula.one.
