Mercedes sit P1 in the 2026 constructors' championship after Miami, 180 points and four wins from four races. Brackley hasn't opened a season this cleanly in the hybrid era, and the new ruleset is the reason the math even allows it.
Miami crystallized the picture. Andrea Kimi Antonelli won, George Russell came home P4, and the Silver Arrows banked another double-points Sunday. That's now four wins in four tries as a constructor, split between a 19-year-old leading the drivers' championship on a perfect 100-point haul and a senior driver sitting P2 in that same standings with 80 points and a victory already in the bank. Two drivers, two championship podium spots, one car doing the heavy lifting underneath both of them.
The regulation reset was always going to redraw the grid, and the early read — going back to the Australia 1-2 and Lando Norris conceding Mercedes has the strongest power unit on the grid — is that Brackley nailed the homework. Ferrari is the team most often mentioned in the same breath on chassis. McLaren and Red Bull are still chasing the picture Mercedes is painting on Sundays.
What to watch next: whether Russell's P4 in Miami was a blip or the first crack in a teammate dynamic that has flipped faster than anyone in the paddock projected. A title fight inside the same garage is the kind of problem Toto Wolff knows intimately — and the kind that can unmake a constructors' lead if it isn't managed.