Ferrari accused of breaking ‘number one rule of engineering’ at Miami GP

Hopes had been high for Ferrari coming to the Sunshine State. While trailing Mercedes by some distance, the Scuderia had shown promise that they potentially could fight the Silver Arrows for victory, bolstered by the fact they brought more upgrades than any other team to Miami.

However, Lewis Hamilton’s race unravelled in the early stages after contact with Franco Colapinto, and the Briton could only finish P6, while teammate Charles Leclerc, having lost the final podium position to Oscar Piastri, spun on the final lap - damage and a 20-second time penalty condemned him to P8. The Monegasque also urged Ferrari to investigate his drop-off in pace throughout the Grand Prix, citing high tyre degradation.

For Hinchcliffe, Ferrari’s woes lie in the sheer number of upgrades they brought to Florida, pointing instead to a more conservative or “sneaky” approach from McLaren team principal Andrea Stella that yielded a Sprint one-two finish and a double podium in the Grand Prix.

Speaking on the F1 Nation podcast, Hinchcliffe explained Ferrari brought too many changes to their SF-26 in Miami, making it difficult to isolate which parts worked and which did not. He said: “This is the number one rule of engineering is make one change at a time, so you can isolate what’s actually better and worse.

Hinchcliffe instead pinpointed McLaren’s Miami GP weekend as the way to go about bringing upgrades. The papaya team brought the second-most new parts to the States, tied with Red Bull on seven, but have seemingly made the most progress over F1’s five-week break, closing their gap to championship leaders Mercedes after a strong 48-point weekend.

Hinchcliffe said: “It’s one of those sneaky things that you could see masterminded by Andrea Stella. He’s one of those guys that would like, ‘Yeah, we could have had all this done, we could delay these few parts, actually give ourselves another couple days to develop them’.