PACE DEBRIEF: Leclerc delivers eye-catching delta in Miami F1 Sprint

Max Verstappen claimed his ninth F1 sprint victory, beating Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc in Miami, but the Ferrari driver was surprisingly close to the reigning world champion. F1Technical’s senior writer Balázs Szabó analyses teams’ performance in the Miami F1 Sprint.

Max Verstappen complained about the lack of grip of his car, and he might have expected his car to struggle a bit. That is why he was eager to put a one-second gap between himself and Leclerc after the safety car left the track in the opening part of the race.

The early part of race saw Verstappen and Leclerc post similar lap times with both recording in the low 1m31s. However, Verstappen’s pace dropped by half a second between Laps 9 and 13, and Leclerc clearly looked the stronger of them in the middle section of the 19-lap sprint.

Leclerc was able to keep his lap times in the low-to-mid 1m31s, that is why he achieved an extremely encouraging delta. By contrast, Verstappen’s five slower laps in the middle of the sprint and the fact that he managed to pick up his pace in the dying stages of the race meant that he ended the race with a bigger delta as shown on the box plot diagram.

Sergio Perez finished third. The Mexican’s box plot diagram is influenced by the two laps he spent behind Ricciardo, but he was unable to mimic Verstappen’s and Leclerc’s pace immediately after making the jump on the Australian. However, he was only fractionally slower than Leclerc thanks to his late race pace that saw him record his fastest lap on the last tour.

There were two DRS trains in today’s sprint race. Ricciardo brilliantly held up Carlos Sainz and Oscar Piastri despite having the slowest average speed across the 100km sprint dash. The extremely small delta of Carlos Sainz indicates that he had much more to offer, but he could not use his speed.

The other DRS train was established behind Kevin Magnussen, who had almost a race-long battle with Lewis Hamilton. Of the boxplot diagrams of this group, Magnussen’s one stood out as the Dane posted half of his laps in the mid 1m32s range.

The top speed charts show the differences between the setup of the cars. The Williams drivers elected to focus on the top speed when setting up their cars for the Miami F1 weekend. Alexander Albon achieved the highest top speed in the entire sprint race, recording 361kph with the help of a tow and DRS. However, his average top speed was 350kph which was six kph higher than what Logan Sargeant, the second driver on this list achieved.

Lewis Hamilton needed an unusually long period of time to overtake Kevin Magnussen. The chart shows that his average top speed was only 339kph despite using DRS on all 15 laps that were taken into consideration. Comparing Hamilton’s average to his rivals, who also had DRS on all of their laps, it clear to discover that his average top speed was four or five kph down.