JACQUES: One thing each team needs to work on

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Following three rounds of the 2026 season, and with a pause in racing through April, Formula 1's 11 teams have been hard at work evaluating the data and chasing performance. Some have much more to do than others but, with the Miami Grand Prix weekend (May 1-3) fast approaching, the return to on-track action isn't far away. F1 TV lead commentator Alex Jacques takes us through one key item each team needs to work on for Miami, and also the races to come... One thing to work on: Dust off the old team mate manual Mercedes have started 2026 brilliantly, winning all three Grands Prix and the single Sprint held so far. Their power unit is a work of art and the chassis is strong, albeit not the strongest. There doesn’t seem to be much for Mercedes to fix once they learn to get off the line, but an intra-team battle means familiar territory for the Silver Arrows – albeit with vastly different characters. George Russell and Kimi Antonelli seemed to have different goals heading into 2026. Russell was set for a first tilt at the title and seemed to ease off at the end of the 2025 season ahead of a probable championship challenge. Antonelli beat his team mate in three of the final five races in 2025, which hinted at a driver finding confidence just in time to receive the best car in the field. Two drivers capable of winning every week, and being in close proximity, is bound to get interesting; not once in the modern era have two drivers in the same team fought for the title without contact at some point of the season. How Mercedes and their drivers handle that fall out will be their biggest task, ahead of any tweaks to the car. CEO and Team Principal Toto Wolff has employed some incredible tactics in the past including making Nico Rosberg pay for his front wing after a botched attempt at defensive driving in Austria. Toto will hope nothing so drastic is required again. Ferrari One thing to work on: Improve the engine Not only have Ferrari made progress from a winless 2025 but their all-star driver pairing of Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc have been thriving with the new regulations. Part of that is due to the rocket starts that have seen both drivers lead laps this season. In China the all-Ferrari wheel-to-wheel battle led to Leclerc saying how much he’d enjoyed the fight despite coming second best. The basis for the competitive first three rounds is the chassis, which started the season as the class of the field. This is exactly how Ferrari did with the last regulation reset but improvements to the power unit are now crucial if they are to contend for Grand Prix wins in 2026. This won’t be possible for Miami but later in the season should see gains in this department. One thing to work on: Improve reliability Whilst the reigning World Champions have started on the back foot this season, ever since Austria 2023 each time McLaren have brought new parts to the car it’s become faster. A considered approach not to rush upgrades, twinned with the great correlation between wind tunnel data and race track, has meant the Woking-based squad have a formidable record of improving a car. Whether they can find consistent reliability is another matter. We’ve only had three races but Lando Norris is on his final battery of the season that he can use without penalty. The team suffered a rare double DNS in China and have lost a whole heap of track time this year chasing a myriad of problems. It’s an unusual sight in modern F1 but the race-free April will have allowed McLaren time to further analyse what’s been hobbling the car. One thing to work on: Develop the car whilst keeping the magic Friday feeling for drivers The Haas drivers are delighted with this year's challenger; both Ollie Bearman and Esteban Ocon report a car which correlates well with their pre-race weekend simulations. It means the car rolls out of the garage for FP1 and the driver can predict what they have underneath them. Bearman recently told F1 TV that, in 2025, weekends would be a marathon slog turning over every aspect of the set up until a solution was found – sometimes in the dying moments of FP3. With that element removed Bearman has adjusted well to a new regulation set and Ocon scored a point in the most recent race. As the team chases even more performance in their quest for fifth place in the standings, the challenge now becomes adding pace whilst keeping the Friday morning feeling, which allows both drivers to attack the weekend immediately. One thing to work on: Score regularly with both cars The page looks to have been turned. After a horrible 2025 when the team finished last in the Constructors', a smart design by David Sanchez and a highly-motivated Pierre Gasly behind the wheel has meant a useful haul of points. This is just six shy of their entire total from 2025 after just three rounds. With new engineering hires joining in the next few months, the target must be to regularly score points with both cars. That's something Alpine managed in China as Franco Colapinto recorded his first points with the team. Since the start of 2025, the lead car has scored points on 10 occasions, the second car (even with two drivers) just once. If the team is to fight for P5 in the Constructors' Championship this must change. One thing to work on: Keep Max Verstappen If you had to bet pre-season which part of the set up would be causing so many problems for Red Bull, most would have opted for the engine. However, a smart acquisition of personnel has meant the Red Bull Ford power unit deserves praise. But, ultimately, they must stop the most important component of Red Bull success in recent times leaving having seen Helmut Marko, Christian Horner, Jonathan Wheatley, Rob Marshall, Will Courtenay and now Gianpiero Lambiase sign elsewhere. It is now imperative to resolve Max Verstappen’s future. Great one-team drivers are more than the performance on the race track, as they become the culture of the team, and none of the obvious replacements are certain to want the move. For example, Benetton won just one more Grand Prix after Michael Schumacher left in 1995 and Ferrari have added just one Drivers' Championship title since the German driver’s exit in 2006. After the brain drain, any rebuild would be doubly difficult without their totemic driver. One thing to work on: Add downforce Liam Lawson and rookie Arvid Lindblad have had a strong start to the season with Racing Bulls scoring points in every race so far, including a superb hard tyre gamble in the Shanghai Sprint, which spoke of a team working well. No matter what the Faenza team is called, they always seem to bring a well-balanced car with a solid set up window and tail off in the later part of the season. The team are targeting more downforce and have gone aggressive in their approach bringing a raft of upgrades at both of the next two races in Miami and Montreal. One thing to work on: The starts Audi have done well with their new power unit because as we’ve seen elsewhere, it is easily possible to get these things drastically wrong. However, they do have an outlier element within the design of the power unit: a whopping great turbo. This design has created a huge flaw so far in their first season in F1. Getting the huge turbo to spin at the correct speed for the start of the race is currently proving elusive – this has to be twinned with the correct deployment of the battery and simply they haven’t mastered it yet. Their best start this year has been Gabriel Bortoleto losing two places off the line but that getaway did include others struggling in the very first race. In the most recent Grand Prix in Japan, Audi lost a combined 10 places with both cars. With teams finding performance all the time, a failure to correct this could make point scoring very difficult, especially as the field gets closer as the season progresses. One thing to work on: Shed the weight It is slightly bewildering how Williams have found themselves in this situation after talking about the 2026 season for years as the great opportunity for the team. But the Grove-based outfit constructed an overweight car, which is not an easy fix: for reference it took Red Bull until after the summer break in 2022 to get the car ‘on weight’ having started the season with a similar issue. Perhaps slightly more worrying is the continuation of long-known problems. For example, the car is known to go light at the rear through certain corners and the team know they are missing downforce compared to their rivals. On the upside every kilo shed will directly correlate into lap time. Team Principal James Vowles has moved further to address this with a hire of long-time Mercedes engineer Dan Milner to a broad overarching role, which is entirely aimed at looking at continuing the Williams modernisation drive. Hopefully the month away from the race track has allowed the team to diagnose the issues because, with a continued lack of progress, both drivers will be exploring their options. One thing to work on: Reduce the gap This feels like the hardest task in the list. While Cadillac’s start has been hugely creditable they now face the incredibly difficult task of closing the gap to a pack that is desperately seeking to add performance as well. Experienced pair Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Perez are calm about their position, both were fully aware of the challenge they’d have to tackle this season but even wise heads have a limit. With both drivers proven F1 winners the charm of a return to the grid will wear off if the team can’t give them a car to fight for Q2 by the end of the campaign. The team gained greater understanding of energy deployment in the first three races and have an upgrade package planned for their first home race of the season in Miami. One thing to work on: Everything painted green Aston Martin have a lot to fix: the central issue is the vibration from the power unit. In Japan, the team trialled an anti vibration fix, which reportedly worked, and this hopefully will allow them to progress to a workable race spec rather than limping around at the back, which was the case for Fernando Alonso at Suzuka. Once the car is in a truly raceable specification, the team effectively finds themselves where everyone else was in late January, where the hard work really begins. Honda has had a month to scour the data but they’ve not been able to push the power unit, limiting their understanding. There will still be unknowns in Miami and the prevailing paddock opinion is they have a huge amount of performance to find even when the basic reliability problems are addressed. Adrian Newey hasn’t had one of his race designs miss the podium since 1989 and yet, such is their start to year, if that stat is preserved it’ll be one of the greatest turnarounds in F1 history. 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