Everything Miami GP’s weather affected. Plus: Red Bull's cautionary tale

The Miami GP race start was moved up by three hours due to weather conditions. Haas Share articlePrime Tire Newsletter | This is The Athletic’s F1 newsletter. Sign up here to receive Prime Tire directly in your inbox twice a week during the season and weekly in the offseason. Welcome back to Prime Tire, where today I’m sitting at Gate D30 at Miami International Airport, waiting to fly home to London looking back on a great week at the 2026 Miami Grand Prix. I’ve been to this race twice before — in 2022 and 2024 — and on race day at the latter, woke up to some rather scary news about my father’s health (all thankfully resolved well). So it was nice to banish some bad memories in Hard Rock Stadium and see Kimi Antonelli’s best F1 win yet. An entertaining resurgence from McLaren certainly helped, too. I’m Alex, and Madeline Coleman will be along later. As I stood in the blazing Miami heat watching Lando Norris and McLaren dominate the sprint race last Saturday, two things sprang to mind: That was because of the severe thunderstorm forecast for Sunday — starting in the morning but striking particularly savagely just after the scheduled 4 p.m. ET (9 p.m. UK) main race start time. F1 has a poor history of dealing with long-predicted rain. I’ll never forget the washout at Spa-Francorchamps, Belgium, in 2021. But last weekend, the F1 organization, the FIA and the Miami GP organizers made exactly the right call: They agreed to move the race start earlier by three hours. The race ran dry throughout, and our F1 team only ran into real rain as we arrived back at our Fort Lauderdale hotel. Erring on the side of caution was wise. Yet it forced the teams to conduct lots of different actions not obvious from the outside. I heard from my contacts at the Haas squad about exactly what starting a race three hours earlier than planned means for an F1 operation. At Haas, this was split into two elements: the race team and the hospitality. And when it came to feeding everyone involved, the two elements intertwined. “We had originally planned to have breakfast at the hotel (on Sunday morning), but then we were coming in a lot earlier and having it at the track, so another task was ensuring we had food at track to facilitate that,” said Haas trackside operations manager Neil Hanley. “We had to change from having breakfast snacks in the garage to a full breakfast service, so the team had to go out and do a shop at 11 p.m. ET on Saturday night.” Haas also needed to provide an extra meal to the guests of the 15 sponsors it brought to the Miami weekend, as they would also be getting into the track earlier. Hayley Gillett, Haas’ senior hospitality manager, revealed “there will be additional costs this weekend, especially for buying additional food and more guest food.” This comes into every team’s cost cap under F1’s financial rules. “(But) where we are so early in the season, we have the flexibility to be able to do that within our budgets,” Gillett added. “A lot of this is done with a ‘just do it’ mentality, and then after the weekend we will review.” In the race, Haas drivers Ollie Bearman went from starting 12th to finishing 11th, while Esteban Ocon finished 13th after starting 14th. After a strong start to the year, it was Haas’ first point-less weekend of the season, as neither driver scored in the sprint either. As they headed for the airport, their mechanics and kit staff were still hard at work, breaking down the garage. Hanley explained the Miami GP implemented “a radius where if there is lightning within eight miles, then we can’t be outside.” He added: “If the rain is torrential as well, we will probably implement our own health and safety protocols because of things like slips and trips that could happen.” In the end, even the rain The Athletic team encountered didn’t delay Haas’ paddock pack up, which was completed without delays. Its re-assembled freight is already on F1’s next journey: to Montreal! It’s not just Antonelli’s results that lit up the early part of this season. It’s his character, too. The 19-year-old is just irrepressible. And Mercedes’ social media team is having a great time highlighting his jokes — from pranking his race engine Peter Bonnington to sleeping through a tire test. Madeline and I got a great view on Antonelli’s ability to delightfully detonate any situation with laughter during Saturday’s news conference, following his GP pole. Antonelli, Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc were all showing the strain of having driven in 94 degrees Fahrenheit (34 degrees Celsius). I wanted to know what that felt like behind the wheel, so I asked Antonelli. His response: 💬 In the sprint race it felt like the first lap out there I had a hairdresser pointed at my face. No, a hairdryer. What did I say? A hairdresser? Oh my God! I’m dreaming! Sorry, long day. It felt like I had a hairdryer in my face, not a hairdresser! You can watch the full moment here. (It features my (not so) dulcet tones.) Now let’s throw it to Madeline. Alpine looked poised for success in the main Miami race, with its drivers qualifying eighth and ninth. But 2026’s fourth GP was ultimately a mixed bag for the team. The start was chaos, impacting numerous drivers. Pierre Gasly lost two positions, while Franco Colapinto picked up damage in contact with Lewis Hamilton. The Argentine driver managed to carry on, but Gasly didn’t make it to 10 laps. The Frenchman went to pass Liam Lawson around the outside at the Turn 17 hairpin, but Lawson’s gearbox failed under braking, leading to the two colliding. Gasly’s car flipped and eventually came to rest on the barriers. In an Alpine news release, Gasly said: “Firstly, I am OK after the incident. It was definitely a scary feeling being flipped over in a Formula 1 car so I am glad it wasn’t too serious and I was able to climb out and walk away.” The stewards ultimately didn’t hand out a penalty due to Lawson’s mechanical failure. Colapinto managed a clean race and had the pace to stay in the points, taking the checkered flag in eighth but was later promoted to seventh due to Leclerc’s penalty. That marked Colapinto’s best finish in F1. “I think since I got to F1, it’s been my most perfect weekend,” Colapinto said afterwards, speaking to reporters. “I am very happy with it. It was executed really well.” Alpine left Miami with five more points and remains in fifth in the constructors’ standings — still miles higher from its last-place finish last year. It wasn’t a pleasant sight watching Isack Hadjar beat himself and his Red Bull up after he crashed out of the Miami GP solo on Sunday. He just wouldn’t stop. His error — clipping the inside wall of the first part of the Turns 14/15 chicane, in a way many of F1’s best have actually done at a similar section at Monaco’s Swimming Pool complex — was tiny. Yet that wasn’t what was really alarming about Hadjar’s weekend. It was the gaps between him and Verstappen across the Red Bull garage in both qualifying sessions. These were one second in SQ3 and 0.8 seconds in Q3. These are big, even by Red Bull second-driver standards. It’s also a very familiar tale at this team. Once car upgrades arrive, as they did for Red Bull in Miami, along with new parts added to the McLaren and Ferrari, Verstappen is a driver transformed. And when his teammate inevitably can’t keep up with him, they fall farther back. Mistakes follow. Confidence drops. Hopefully this version doesn’t end up with Hadjar being dropped from the Red Bull lineup, too — like Gasly, Alex Albon, Sergio Pérez, Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda. Of course it’s still too early for that long list to get longer, especially with Helmut Marko no longer calling Red Bull’s driver shots. And Verstappen’s future with the team is what really concerns it most in early 2026. But Hadjar needs to reverse this new trend. Fast. 🇮🇹 As the paddock was being packed down around us in Hard Rock Stadium on Sunday, Madeline assessed the pressure on Antonelli after his third straight win. 🍊 Meanwhile, I asked if McLaren is really back as a major contender for F1 wins after dominating 2025, and then being overtaken by Mercedes as 2026 commenced. The answer is complicated and hinges on just how good the orange team has been over the years in Miami. 🌭 And I couldn’t end this send without a hat tip to my PT co-driver Patrick Iversen, who skewered the $100 hotdog (and accompanying $100 sandwich) at the Miami track’s fan zone. I helped him eat them (another hard task), and it’s fair to say I enjoyed them more than Pat. But I agree with him, definitely not worth the ridiculous price. 📫 Love Prime Tire? Check out The Athletic’s other newsletters. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms