Karun Chandhok has gone on the record with what most of the paddock has been whispering since Saturday afternoon in Miami: Ferrari's biggest in-season swing of 2026 has, by all internal measures at the rival garages, missed.
The Sky Sports F1 analyst told viewers during the Miami review that contacts inside Mercedes and McLaren left the weekend openly unworried about Ferrari's championship threat. Maranello brought arguably the largest single upgrade package of the field to the Miami International Autodrome, including a new floor edge, revised diffuser geometry and reworked rear-suspension fairings, and emerged still well off the pace of the Mercedes and the McLaren in clean air on Sunday.
That is a disappointing showing for a team whose opening flyaways had suggested it might break into a three-way title fight. Race-pace data put Ferrari roughly six tenths a second per lap adrift of Kimi Antonelli's Mercedes through similar tyre stints, and visibly off Lando Norris in even the cleanest sections of running. The team's own leadership did not deny the size of the deficit. Diego Tondi, Ferrari's head of race operations, conceded after the chequered flag that the team needs to 'understand why the upgrade did not deliver the step we expected' before the Canadian Grand Prix in early June.
The driver picture is no warmer. Lewis Hamilton crossed the line outside the points before being promoted to fifth via Charles Leclerc's 20-second penalty. He flagged a battery-deployment problem he has now raised in three of four 2026 rounds and called the race 'a long afternoon in no man's land' after Franco Colapinto damaged his floor on lap one.
'I put a very strong race in the bin', Leclerc told Sky after the race, accepting that the floor he had been given was not the leap forward Ferrari had publicly briefed.
For Chandhok the analytical conclusion is simple. If this was Ferrari's first-half-of-season halo upgrade, the championship is closing into a Mercedes-versus-McLaren two-way story. The next test arrives in Canada at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, where Ferrari's traction-out-of-slow-corner package historically stands up better than its high-speed configuration. If the SF26 cannot find clear air there, the rival pit walls will treat Maranello as a once-a-weekend nuisance rather than a title threat.
For Hamilton specifically, the calculation is whether the Miami struggle was Colapinto-induced floor damage or symptomatic of a deeper aero correlation issue. The seven-time champion has been unusually direct in his post-race commentary. The pit lane, by Chandhok's reading, has already made up its mind.
