Shanghai is an underrated F1 circuit

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to a slight worry that my rapturous praise of the 2026 Formula 1 regulations was a bit premature, but after two races, it is obvious. The Shanghai round certainly turned up the new-car chaos with lots of cars missing sessions or even failing to start the race — including BOTH MCLARENS!!! — due to various gremlins. But the racing was superb throughout once again — even the sprint was good — and Kimi Antonelli gave us all the joy of seeing someone win his first grand prix for the first time in a while, which he did by passing his teammate as Formula 1’s youngest ever polesitter.

(Unfortunately, Bob Constanduros on the PA tried to ruin the greatest moment of Kimi’s life by announcing him as “Kimi Raikkonen”.)

This is a guess, but I’m guessing we saw teams take a bit more risk in round 2, and the increase in problems was the consequence. You just want to have a complete weekend at round 1 of a new car, and Melbourne was a particularly extreme track to start with due to its energy demands. With a little more confidence in China, teams f’d around more, and they consequently found out more.

Obviously the trophy for worst weekend goes to McLaren. Oscar Piastri hasn’t gotten a single lap in a grand prix after two of them, and this time, defending world champion Lando Norris didn’t get any, either.

Aston Martin promises they’re making behind-the-scenes progress, but we’re still getting onboard video of Fernando Alonso taking his hands off the wheel to try to shake life back into them.

Williams’ car is a total mess, which is hugely disappointing given how much they hyped up their own 2026 program, but Carlos Sainz did bag a couple points in the race.

Clearly the most famously bad weekend is that of Red Bull, even though it masks the fact that Isack Hadjar picked up four points for P8, and Liam Lawson beat him in the Racing Bulls. Max Verstappen had to retire the car with 11 laps to go, and now he hates the car and the sport and you and me and everyone.

Cadillac also showed more growing pains this weekend — including Checo crashing into Valtteri slightly on lap 1, for which he apologized — but they both finished the race, so we’ll take that!

Also highly worth mentioning is the fifth place performance of Ollie Bearman and Haas. Alpine is also apparently back in the game. Both cars finished in the points, Colapinto in P10 and Gasly in P6. Haas and Alpine — power unit customers of Ferrari and Mercedes, respectively — are the examples of customer teams who seem to have gotten it right this year.

Which brings us to Ferrari! Recall that Lewis’ only meaningful achievement in his debut season with Ferrari last year was winning the China sprint race. Well, this year in China, he finally stood on the podium of a grand prix again, and it was a seriously lovely moment with Kimi, Bono, and Lewis all up there together. George Russell was also present.

Yes, Mercedes obviously has a power advantage, but it’s no longer clear that they’re going to keep that advantage over Ferrari for long. In both grands prix and the Shanghai sprint, both Ferraris have troubled Mercedes, and while George and Kimi certainly seem happy to be driving the fastest car, both Lewis and Charles report that they’re having a blast driving the Ferrari, which is what it should be like to drive Ferraris, don’t you think?

Shanghai — in my view the most consistently underrated track on the F1 calendar — demonstrates more of what F1 cars can do than Melbourne did, and that also means the cars spend less time doing any particular thing, so there were no meaningful energy starvation problems, and everybody seemed to have plenty of juice to make dicey racing moves. I really do recommend watching both the sprint and the grand prix. Formula 1 racing is really fun again, I can’t wait for more, and it really sucks that we’re losing two races this spring due to the tragic stupidity of warfare.