Ferrari brought the largest upgrade package of any frontrunning team to Miami, with new parts declared to the FIA from the front of the car to the back. By the end of Sunday's Grand Prix it had drifted more than 20 seconds behind the leaders, lost a podium to a last-lap crash, and copped a penalty that compounded the damage.
It was a disorienting weekend for a team that began it looking like a genuine podium threat.
Charles Leclerc led the opening stint after a clean launch and a perfectly judged first corner that suckered both Kimi Antonelli and Max Verstappen into big lock-ups. By lap 16 he was still inside a second of eventual race winner Antonelli. The Ferrari had also chased the McLarens in Saturday's sprint and looked, at that point, to be kinder on its tyres than Mercedes.
Then the race quietly slipped away.
By the final lap Leclerc was more than 20 seconds behind Antonelli and Lando Norris. His attempt to claw the final podium spot back from Oscar Piastri ended on the wall, the Monégasque spinning hard out of the closing sequence of corners. The damaged Ferrari was demoted to sixth on the road and then to eighth after a 22-second penalty for repeatedly cutting corners as he wrestled the car home.
Leclerc was clear about what he had felt under him. He described "massive degradation" on the medium tyre and said even the harder compound never gave him the comfort he had enjoyed during Saturday's sprint.
That admission underlines the central mystery. Ferrari maintains the Miami upgrade worked. Leclerc was emphatic that the new parts delivered as advertised. If the package is good and the tyres are the problem, then Maranello has to look elsewhere for the answer, because the issue keeps repeating — bright, competitive starts followed by a race-pace fade that no amount of headline qualifying form has been able to disguise.
Even within the Ferrari camp, the trend is hard to ignore. Across this opening run of 2026 races, the SF-26 has shown the speed to qualify on the front three rows, only to end Sundays watching cars pull away. Miami was simply the clearest example yet.
The added pain is that the rest of the field did not stand still. Mercedes brought only minor parts and still won the race. McLaren brought a heavy upgrade package and Norris arrived within striking distance until the pit-stop sequence handed track position to Antonelli. Red Bull's RB22 transformed from China and Japan midfield fodder into a front-row qualifier in the same window.
Ferrari, by contrast, brought the most stuff and went backwards. It's the kind of result that triggers post-mortems inside a competitive team.
Leclerc's own read is that this is not yet a pattern of races slipping away. The numbers, for now, suggest otherwise. Across the opening rounds the team has consistently been stronger on Saturday than on Sunday. Until that changes, the largest upgrade package in the pit lane will keep being the most uncomfortable footnote in Ferrari's weekend.
Canada, the next round, is exactly the kind of stop-start, energy-sensitive circuit that tends to expose cars with race-pace weaknesses. Ferrari has weeks to work out what the Miami upgrade did not.
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*Originally published on [News Formula 1](https://newsformula.one/article/ferrari-miami-2026-biggest-upgrade-leclerc-race-pace-mystery-degradation). Visit for full coverage.*
