The 2026 Formula 1 season unexpectedly stopping for a month isn’t great for those already on form and racking up points.
But it could be very good news for troubled teams who will really benefit from a month back at base to dig into and maybe even solve the problems that have dogged them so far.
Here’s our ranking of the five squads that could benefit most from the calendar gap before what Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff calls a big “restart” in Miami in four weeks’ time.
5 McLaren
What Oscar Piastri described as one of the best weekends of his F1 career at the Japanese Grand Prix might make it appear as if McLaren isn’t really all that troubled.
But Piastri’s second place was an impressive overachievement from team and driver, for reigning champion McLaren still has a sizeable deficit to the works Mercedes team.
Though McLaren has made significant progress with exploiting the Mercedes power unit, it remains several steps behind on both engine performance and reliability.
Lando Norris had to switch to his third and final allowed battery at Suzuka. If he takes a fourth before the end of the year, that’s a grid penalty.
A lot of McLaren’s reliability woes – like the double failure to start in China – are to do with Mercedes components, but it’s curious how McLaren is having far more costly issues than the works Mercedes team or its new customer Alpine.
It has a significant chassis weakness, too. McLaren’s overall pace deficit may have shrunk from 0.888% in China to 0.399% in Japan, but Suzuka masked some key weaknesses.
The Ferrari power unit struggled more at Suzuka, so it left the door open for McLaren to be Mercedes’ closest challenger.
The absence of tyre graining at Suzuka also helped McLaren as that was a key weakness for it across the first two weekends, one team principal Andrea Stella admitted McLaren is “slightly more susceptible to” than Ferrari or Mercedes.
So McLaren will be working hard across the April gap to deliver a substantial upgrade package in Miami, with the team’s supreme in-season development across much of the last era the clear template to replicate if it is to have any chance of defending its titles.
4 Audi
Audi’s started its first F1 season with similar pace to the teams currently fighting for fourth in the constructors’ championship – yet it’s scored just two points so far and is a distant eighth in the standings.
It’s not reaping much reward from being up with the likes of Haas, Alpine and even Red Bull on pure performance. Poor reliability has been one element of that, with one Audi not even making it to the start at each of the first two grands prix. But the biggest pain right now is how dramatically the Audis go backwards off the line when they do make it to the grid.
Nico Hulkenberg has lost a staggering 19 places across the first laps of the three F1 races he’s actually been able to start this year, with Gabriel Bortoleto faring a little better but still dropping four places off the line at Suzuka last time out – which is wasting all the in-Q3-or-close-to-it qualifying efforts.
Audi’s giving mixed signals on how much it can actually do about that. It’s understood to have gone the wrong way on turbo design and is stuck with a large turbo that cannot be spooled up fast enough to start as well as the Ferraris or even the Mercedes.
But it’s also suggested there are things that can be done with battery strategy and deployment over the opening laps that can reduce the pain a little – and that will be a key focus back at base in this pause.
Its actual performance deficit seems to be more on the power unit than chassis side, so it’s one of the teams waiting for the rules break to try to tackle that, but in the meantime Audi plans to delve into its deployment data to see if there are things that can “mitigate” its problems for now.
And team principal Mattia Binotto feels there’s plenty more Audi can do this month just by having a pause to properly assess its performance and operations so far after what he calls a “very, very reactive” period with “really no time to start even thinking about developments” while it was chasing its tail on the reliability front in the opening races.
3 Red Bull
Those pre-season claims of Red Bull being one second faster on the straights from Toto Wolff seem a distant memory now.
We know its power unit is not the most raceable – see Max Verstappen’s struggles to overtake Pierre Gasly at Suzuka – with the deployment seeming to be a little bit off.
But as far as the drivers are concerned, the engine’s actually not the biggest problem. As Isack Hadjar put it bluntly, while the engine is “good” the chassis is “terrible”.
Hadjar and Verstappen laid bare those issues after Suzuka qualifying, complaining of the car going from “one extreme to another” in terms of understeer and oversteer from one session to another, or even from one lap to the next.
That unsurprisingly means the Red Bull is “all over the place”, leaves the drivers bereft of confidence to attack corners – a trait you’d never associate with Verstappen – and so they end up “bleeding laptime”.
Red Bull is a “distant fourth” in team principal Laurent Mekies’ words, though it should be noted that, using the supertimes metric – the fastest lap set on a weekend expressed as a percentage of the fastest time overall – it was slower than Alpine in Japan too.
Worse still, Red Bull’s struggling to isolate its problems. Verstappen said the team has an idea of what it’s trying to fix, but at Suzuka changes were making the car “worse again”, while Hadjar sounded the alarm bells by saying Red Bull has “no lead” on how to make the car faster.
It desperately needs to find that lead if it’s to reduce what Mekies called a “substantial” gap to the front. And so a month of thinking, developing and simulator time is particularly welcome for Red Bull.
2 Williams
Williams perhaps has the most straightforward task in this extended break. That’s because of the pace that will be unlocked by advancing its light-weighting programme.
The car started the season significantly overweight, so whittling away at that will directly correlate to improved pace.
A figure of three to four tenths of a second is traditionally cited as the penalty of being 10kg over and Williams started the season well in excess of that.
As team principal James Vowles said in Australia, “the majority number” when it comes to the Williams pace deficit is that weight. He also suggested under these new rules the time penalty is even bigger than it used to be.
There’s a cost cap challenge when it comes to the task of producing whatever new components are required to achieve the weight reduction. That’s where the equation is a little more complicated than simply the space created by two races being dropped, but given the hope always was to be in much better shape come Miami it at least ensures there will be no additional problems caused by parts losses. Saudi Arabia in particular is always a risk given Jeddah’s high-speed layout and the close proximity of the walls.
Alex Albon said during the Chinese GP weekend that the “plan” was for a big step in the right direction for Miami. That plan is now simpler than it was when there were two races to deal with in April too, so expect the Williams to be more competitive come Friday practice in the US.
The other advantage is that the loss of the Middle East races means that two events where Williams might have been expected to struggle more are eliminated, which could be significant when it comes to constructors’ championship position – and therefore income – come the end of the year.
1 Aston Martin
The list of things Aston Martin and Honda have fixed is a lot shorter than what needs to be improved. Some of that work also has a long lead time…
A big engine performance upgrade can’t happen immediately because Honda must wait for the first FIA development window to open next month.
So even though this April gap has eradicated two weekends Aston Martin and Honda would have spent still trying to break out of their embarrassing early form, it could have limited value.
Honda’s immediate room for improvement seems to be with energy management strategies. But this is a direct consequence of a massive deficit in track time compared to the opposition.
So moving along that learning curve really depends on completing more race weekends and putting lessons about battery charging and deployment into action.
However, any downtime to make progress is still a net win.
Honda can still forensically go over its data so far to work out what could be improved. And it seems possible, but not guaranteed, that a specification change for reliability could be ready for Miami – Aston Martin and Honda having relied on short-term “countermeasures” so far.
And there might be more progress possible on the chassis side, with chief trackside officer Mike Krack saying Aston Martin is “working flat-out to make it faster”.
Aston Martin now has time that can be spent on things like the vibrations fix that was trialled seemingly successfully in Japan but for some reason couldn’t be raced – maybe because of a lack of spares, which can now be built up.
It’s also a big window to take some weight off a heavy car, and try to understand why its high-speed performance is so bad given how much Adrian Newey’s talked up the aerodynamic potential.
