Box-office? Definitely. This year’s edition of the F1 race at Austin’s Circuit of the Americas threw up a thrilling battle between the two title protagonists over third – one that predictably ended with a stewards’ call that split the audience. Ferrari’s commanding 1-2 was almost secondary to the battle between Max Verstappen and Lando Norris.
Charles Leclerc was brilliantly opportunistic at the start, waiting for the Verstappen-Norris fight at the front to boil over beyond the white lines for him to ghost into the lead and leave the two in his wake. But Ferrari had known after the sprint race that a win was on the cards, even from the second row of the grid.
PLUS: How Leclerc won another 'Austria situation' over Red Bull in Austin
There were fights throughout the field over contested championship positions, over track limits penalties, and over an unexpected rivalry between a man in his 40s and a man who wasn’t even born when the aforementioned veteran made his F1 debut.
Here’s everything we learned in the Lone Star state.
1. Ferrari’s recent upgrades pass the litmus test
“I think this will be the most important test so far for us, to see whether all these upgrades that we brought in the past are working in the right direction for more of a normal kind of track”.
This was Carlos Sainz’s tentative assessment of Ferrari’s hopes on Thursday, as a recent run of good form at Monza, Baku, and Singapore all came at less conventional circuits.
Had the team eradicated the performance loss it sustained in high-speed corners through bouncing? Ferrari’s 1-2 punch in Austin suggested that it had at least alleviated those symptoms – at least, to a certain degree.
In qualifying, the SF-24 seemed to struggle with the bumps in the opening sector and thus the drivers couldn’t attack the esses with the same gusto as Verstappen or Norris, but the car was dynamite in race trim.
Remember back in 2022 when Ferrari had a habit of chewing through its Pirellis? That’s a long-faded memory now; the red cars now have a delicate touch with tyres and this has opened considerable latitude with strategy. Sainz could be pulled in for his stop knowing that an undercut could work long-term, and Leclerc could go deeper into the race on the mediums to ensure he had a tyre delta for his second and final stint.
The constructors’ championship lead is only 48 points away. And, on this form, it’s certainly achievable.
2. Passing off-track isn’t acceptable – except when it is
Who’d be an F1 steward? For most of us, deciding what to have for dinner is enough of an ordeal; making the call that has a direct effect on a multi-billion dollar championship outcome is a comparative behemoth with vast consequences either way. I’ll have the gravlax, please.
The stewards’ decision to hand Lando Norris a five-second penalty for passing Max Verstappen off-track came amid complaints about consistency. Norris brought up that Verstappen had made a place at the start by going off the road at Turn 1 and taking the McLaren driver with him into the run-off.
Equally, Verstappen going deep into Turn 12 seconds before that move that had Norris off could be equated to the penalty George Russell got for putting Valtteri Bottas wide at the same turn. McLaren was so convinced that Verstappen would get a penalty for putting Norris off that it did not ask its driver to hand the place back.
This isn’t a statement about what the right call should have been. In retrospect, Verstappen might have got the same five seconds as Russell had Norris stayed behind. Alternatively, Norris could have thrown caution to the wind and divebombed his way past a couple of laps before.
This would have given him a couple of extra laps to build the requisite five-second gap to cover off the penalty. Or just put gravel there; physical limits are much more well-defined than those described on paper...
3. Mercedes’ sensitivity issues dampen upgrade optimism
During Friday’s sessions, Mercedes looked distinctly fleet of foot as it wedged itself in the battle between the Ferraris and Max Verstappen’s Red Bull. A series of new upgrades injected a sense of optimism into a team that had not enjoyed particularly stellar form after the summer break, and both George Russell and Lewis Hamilton were in contention for sprint pole. Hamilton might have managed it, had Franco Colapinto not gone off at Turn 12 just ahead to bring out a yellow flag...
The wind had changed on Saturday. Higher temperatures on Saturday threw the brace of W15s out of the tyre window; Russell suffered with degradation, while Hamilton had to contend with graining and a suspension issue in a lonely run to sixth.
The weekend never really came back to Mercedes as temperatures stayed high, and the knife-edge balancing act that the car tenuously performed ended in disaster as Hamilton fell out in Q1 and Russell shunted at Turn 18 in the final phase.
Russell at least recovered sixth from a pitlane start, but Hamilton lobbed his car into the gravel on lap two; a gust of wind was blamed for the snap at the rear.
“There will be lots of digging between why were we fastest on Friday evening, and why not anymore in qualifying the next day?” Toto Wolff said. “What were the circumstances of that? What does the data say?
“And then today's performance, lots of data collection. So that's why it's not concerning for me. It's just where we are. We're back to underdog status.”
4. Red Bull bib controversy spills over
Before this weekend, ‘bib’ in common parlance was the thing babies wear around their necks to stop them dribbling mashed banana down themselves. It’s also used to refer to the part of the undertray at the front of the floor; for the teams, this is an open-source component, meaning that all teams have access to a team’s design for this part.
Controversy over Red Bull’s bib design flared up in the Austin paddock, as it became apparent that it had a mechanism in place that allowed it to adjust the bib height quickly from within the tub.
There was speculation that the team had used it to change the floor height from qualifying to the race, not permissible by parc ferme regulations. Red Bull countered that this was not something that could be adjusted while the car was fully assembled, although McLaren was vocal on wanting the FIA to investigate further into the design. It wanted to determine to understand if its rival outfit had made changes during parc ferme previously.
The FIA found no evidence that this had been used between qualifying and the race previously. A well-placed Sky Sports F1 camera showed Max Verstappen’s number one mechanic Ole Schack showing the FIA how the system could be accessed through the bulkhead, with a socket on the end of a long metal rod. Some suggested that this was performative, but the FIA nonetheless considered the matter closed.
Regardless, the infantile spats that emerged as a result were worthy of bibs – the baby kind – to stop the seemingly endless dribbling of sour grapes staining the shirts of various team personnel on both sides of the argument.
5. Haas now heads battle for sixth over RB, after tricking Alpine
A double-points finish in the Austin sprint and Nico Hulkenberg’s eighth place in the full-length grand prix lifted Haas above RB in the hotly contested battle for sixth in the constructors’ championship. A series of upgrades seemed to give the American squad more ammunition in that battle, although Kevin Magnussen nonetheless bagged seventh in the sprint without them before his car was upgraded in the gap before grand prix qualifying.
While Magnussen ran ahead of Hulkenberg in Sunday’s race, he ended up playing the sacrificial lamb once more. The team needed to get Pierre Gasly out of the way as the Alpine driver was running well in sixth, and so pulled Magnussen in slightly early (thus converting his race to a two-stop) to goad the French team into responding. It duly did so, and Magnussen ended up getting the undercut on the one-time race winner in the process.
This allowed Hulkenberg to go deeper into the race in clear air and, when the German stopped, he came out well ahead of the Frenchman to ensure he’d climbed a few positions among the points finishers. Magnussen was also making rapid progress in front and the team tried to time a switch to the medium tyres to give him a shot of climbing back into the points – but Franco Colapinto ahead was too quick to close down.
“They decided to put the pressure with one car, and we just fell for it and reacted when the medium was the better compound for the race,” Gasly griped. “We lost four or five seconds in the pits, exited in the traffic and just struggled massively on the hard.”
6. Alonso fought the Law(son) – and Lawson won
If anyone had put the emergence of the weird spat between Fernando Alonso and Liam Lawson on their bingo card for this weekend, then they certainly ought to win something. It all kicked off in the sprint race: in their battle over 15th place, Lawson saw Alonso looming larger in his mirrors and moved across to cover the line before moving back into the usual position for the Turn 12 braking zone.
This forced Alonso to drop deep while passing, which allowed Lawson to achieve a switchback into the next corner and park his car on the apex to ensure the Aston Martin could not throw its nose down the inside. “The AlphaTauri is such an idiot,” Alonso exclaimed, audibly upset at the robustness of Lawson’s defence. The two were seen afterwards ‘in discussion’ over the sprint race events.
Alonso got his own back slightly in qualifying after overtaking Lawson on their Q1 out-laps, disrupting the Kiwi enough for him to say “he’s doing exactly what he said he’d do” over the radio. “He said he would screw me, and I guess he kept his word,” Lawson explained afterwards, although Alonso perhaps hadn’t quite clocked that the returning RB driver was due to start from the back of the grid in any case.
Lawson won the overall battle, however. Fresh from dispatching Lance Stroll around the outside of Turn 6, the New Zealander then put a tidy move on Alonso on lap 11 into the Turn 12 braking zone and then covered off all bases in the following corners – Alonso kicked up the dirt in Turn 14 in an effort to find a way back past. It was ultimately futile.
7. 2026 cars get extra two-seconds boost after rules improvements
When the 2026 regulations were unveiled at this year’s Canadian Grand Prix, many of the team principals were not only irked at the way the FIA had perhaps attempted to strongarm them into accepting the new rules, but also at the comparative lack of performance. A 40% reduction in downforce, thanks to the reduction in Venturi tunnel size and revised aerodynamics, has now been reduced to just a 15% deficit versus the current cars.
FIA head of single-seaters Nikolas Tombazis says that the 2026 rules have been changed to enlarge the diffuser, the bounding box for the front wing, and allow for leading edge devices for the floor. The earlier performance points with adjustable aerodynamics and smaller size remain in place.
The 2026 cars in their current form will now be, per Tombazis, around a second a lap slower than the current machinery. Whether the additional aerodynamic allowances dilute the effect of the desired on-track product remains to be seen, although the performance effect of narrower tyres should not be underestimated. Teams cannot work on the aerodynamics of their 2026 cars until the 1 January next year.
