2026 Chinese GP Review

What a race weekend, the first sprint weekend of the 2026 season, quite a disappointing showing from last year’s champions, and a fantastic pole position and grand prix victory for Antonelli.

With having two starts this weekend, Ferrari were once again able to show off how fantastic their car is getting off the line, with both drivers able to make up places from their starting positions.

The Sprint

The first sprint of the season showed off how dominant that Mercedes package is this season. However, it was also a great showing from Ferrari, with a double podium for Leclerc and Hamilton. Even with quite a shocking start, and dropping down the order, Antonelli was able to drag his Mercedes back up to fifth, just behind Norris, who also had a decent result in fourth. The RedBull cars didn’t have a great time during the sprint, with Verstappen losing a handful of positions off the line, and Hadjar dropping down after contact with Antonelli.

Qualifying

Watching qualifying, the concerns from last weekend appeared once again, with these regulations not enabling drivers to push their cars to the absolute knife edge. There were times when you’d see a driver up 0.500s in their first sector, but then drop away continuing into the second and third sectors. It really seems that to get the best lap time out of these cars you need to do the opposite and play things safe throughout the entire lap, and you’ll be rewarded with a faster lap time.

Getting into the actual qualifying session, it looked to setup an interesting grid with Mercedes first and second, Ferrari third and fourth, and McLaren fifth and sixth. Gasly was able to pull some magic out of the Alpine, and bring it up to seventh on the grid, with the RedBull pair just behind in ninth and tenth.

The Race

Moving onto the main race itself, there was drama before we even went lights out with four cars not taking the start. These include the Williams of Albon, the Audi of Bortoleto, and both the McLarens.

Lights out, and away the Ferraris went as they launched off the line. With Antonelli on pole, he attempted to cover off Russell in second, but this opened up the door for Hamilton to take the lead, and give Leclerc enough room to take third away from Russell. Again, Verstappen struggled off the line dropping like a stone, and giving himself quite a bit of work to do throughout the race.

Later on, we were treated to a fantastic battle between Leclerc and Hamilton after Antonelli had taken the lead. Lap after lap, the two swapped positions. These new regs bringing in something that’s being dubbed as yo-yo racing. This battle would continue on until Russell made it through and calmed things down. That Mercedes was once again the king of the grid, with Russell taking second place 5s behind Antonelli, and Hamilton in third another 25s down.

This race also showed off some reliability issues that we’ve seen in the past with large regulation changes, beyond the four cars that did not take the start, there were also three DNFs. These included both of the Aston Martins, and Verstappen.