It’s Raceweek again! This time with TWICE the action! Yes, finally, Formula 1 has returned to the world stage with the Miami Grand Prix, after an impromptu month-long Spring Break. This time, however, Formula E will also be holding its own Berlin E-Prix. For the first time since beginning my Motorsport fascination, I’m now spoiled for Racing content to watch. This time around, I’m getting out in front of the action with some news and predictions for this weekend’s full-throttle fun!

Verstappen ain’t Verstoppen anytime soon, at least according to Red Bull. While the start of this season has not gone according to plan, team principal Laurent Mekies has been categorical that his star driver isn’t going anywhere, waving off the recent run of staff departures (most notably race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase’s announced jump to McLaren) with a flat “absolutely not.” The only person who doesn’t seem to have gotten that memo is Max himself. He’s been critical of the 02026 Regulations for several years now, and, as we’ve already noted across the opening 3 GPs, his concerns weren’t entirely unfounded. At a Viaplay event last week, he thanked the FIA for the tweaks coming to Miami, then called the rules “fundamentally wrong” in essentially the same breath, floated retiring “in a few years’ time,” and lobbied for a return to V10 or V8 engines. Mekies says the campus is “on fire” with motivation. Max says he’s not enjoying himself in the car. Both things are presumably true, which is exactly the kind of contradiction Miami is supposed to resolve.

On that note regarding the Regulations, several will be implemented as part of this upcoming race weekend, all stemming from a unanimous vote among the FIA, Formula 1, the teams, and the power unit manufacturers earlier this month. The crunch meeting came during the spring break, with Oliver Bearman’s terrifying 50G impact at Suzuka catalyzing everyone’s agreement that something had to change quickly. That crash, where Bearman closed on Franco Colapinto’s energy-harvesting Alpine at speed, exemplified the closing-speed problem drivers had been complaining about since pre-season testing.

The bulk of the changes target energy management, the very system Verstappen has memorably likened to “Mario Kart” and “Formula E on steroids.” Maximum permitted recharge over a qualifying lap drops from 8MJ (Megajoules) to 7MJ, which sounds counterintuitive at first, since giving drivers less energy ought to make qualifying worse, not better. The trick is that the goal isn’t to give them more juice, it’s to free them from spending so much of the lap recharging in the first place. In the same spirit, peak super clip power gets bumped from 250kW (Kilowatts) to 350kW, meaning when drivers do need to recharge while flat on the throttle, they can do so in roughly two to four seconds per lap instead of dragging it out across half the straight. The FIA estimates this trade-off will cost about a second of lap time but should let drivers actually attack a qualifying lap rather than nurse it.

For race conditions, the new Boost mode is capped at +150kW above current power, a measure aimed squarely at preventing the kind of catastrophic closing-speed differentials that nearly killed Bearman. MGU-K deployment stays at 350kW in key acceleration and overtaking zones but drops to 250kW elsewhere on the lap, preserving the yo-yo racing F1 has been proud of without the dangerous knife-edge of cars suddenly running out of battery in random parts of the circuit.

The fourth change is the most fascinating, and the only one being trialed rather than fully implemented this weekend: a new “low power start detection” system that will trigger automatic MGU-K deployment if a car bogs down at the lights. Current rules forbid the MGU-K from doing anything below 50km/h to prevent teams from engineering de facto launch control, but that ban gets overridden if the petrol-powered start fails badly enough to be a safety risk. Affected cars will also flash visual warning lights to alert drivers behind, presumably so nobody gets steamrolled trying to overtake what they assumed was just a slow getaway. The FIA wants to see this in race conditions before locking it in.

Sky Sports’ Martin Brundle reckons these tweaks may “relaunch” the season more than fix it, and that’s probably the right framing. Teams are also bringing significant upgrade packages to Miami after five weeks of unrestricted factory work, so the combination of refined rules and fresh aero might well shake the pecking order. So far, that order has been a Mercedes shutout, with Kimi Antonelli leading George Russell by nine points after back-to-back wins in China and Japan, and the Silver Arrows sweeping all three opening rounds. To stir the pot further, Miami is the season’s second Sprint weekend, which means twice the points and twice the opportunities for chaos.

Meanwhile, the all-electric series F1 is allegedly impersonating runs its own double-header in Berlin this weekend, with Rounds 7 and 8 of Formula E’s twelfth season at the iconic Tempelhof Airport circuit. Tempelhof has appeared on every Formula E calendar since the championship’s inception in 02014, and this weekend’s Hankook Berlin E-Prix marks its 23rd and 24th races on those notoriously abrasive concrete slabs. The event is officially sold out, which tracks based on who’s leading the championship.

Pascal Wehrlein arrives as home hero with an 11-point cushion on 83 points, riding a string of consistent Porsche podiums into his home race. Porsche tops the Teams’ standings as well, though Jaguar is breathing down its neck and arrives as the form team of the season. Antonio Felix da Costa won Madrid in dominant fashion, Mitch Evans now sits atop Formula E’s all-time wins list with his 15th career victory after a wet-weather charge from ninth to first at Miami, and Jaguar has taken three of the last four races. They also swept both Tempelhof rounds last year, so the Big Cats arrive in Berlin with both momentum and a track record.

Tempelhof itself remains one of the most tactical venues on the calendar. The concrete slabs that once hosted airliners chew tires aggressively, the long flat sections invite slipstreaming battles deep into the race, and the strategic cost of leading early is well-known: drivers who open a gap in the opening laps frequently find themselves short on energy when it matters. Attack Mode sits at Turn 2 for both races, granting full 350kW with all-wheel drive, and the GEN3 Evo cars are quick enough (0 to 100 km/h in 1.82 seconds, top speeds of 320 km/h) to make the long start-finish straight a real threat zone. Expect three- and four-wide braking zones, energy roulette in the closing laps, and the strategic unpredictability that makes Formula E worth watching.

Before signing off, a few words on three teams whose stories have me hooked across both series this weekend.

Cadillac arrives in Miami for what is, technically, a home race, even though the team is mostly headquartered in the UK near Silverstone. After three rounds, the score reads zero points and zero Q2 appearances. F1’s eleventh team was widely expected to finish last in its debut year, and the experienced Perez and Bottas pairing was assembled precisely to extract the maximum from a debut car that everyone, the team included, expected to be off the pace. Reliability has actually been the quiet success story so far, with Perez seeing the chequered flag in every Grand Prix and the Shanghai Sprint, which is more than several established teams can say for themselves. Bottas’s P13 in Australia is the team’s high-water mark on paper, but outqualifying both Aston Martins at Suzuka was arguably the more meaningful moment. The MAC-26 chassis, named for Mario Andretti as a nod to the project’s original Andretti Global roots, sits roughly a second a lap off the midfield, and the team has been refreshingly candid that Miami is their first real test. They’re bringing their first significant upgrade package this weekend, with Perez setting the summer break as the realistic target for first points. For a team running its inaugural season out of three different facilities on two continents, on Ferrari power until General Motors brings its own engine in 02029, an early-Haas feels well within reach. There are reasons to be optimistic about the boys, even with the timing sheets looking the way they do.

Ferrari, meanwhile, is in that uncomfortable space of being measurably the second-best team in the championship and still 45 points adrift of Mercedes after only three rounds. The SF-26 has the best starts on the grid, which is why both Leclerc and Hamilton have led laps already this year, and Ferrari is the only team apart from Mercedes to land a podium at every round so far. The trouble is that they cannot yet hold those positions to the chequered flag, and the bigger trouble is that they keep racing each other when they should be racing the Silver Arrows. While exciting, in Australia, Leclerc and Russell were locked in a brilliant duel, only for Hamilton to dive into the mix and accidentally hand Antonelli the second Mercedes free passage. Whether by team orders, by qualifying head-to-head (currently 0-3 in Leclerc’s favour), or by sheer good luck, Maranello needs to figure out which of its drivers is the lead bet against Mercedes, and figure it out quickly. Hamilton’s first Ferrari podium in China after twenty-five races of waiting was a genuinely emotional moment, and even Brundle thinks he’ll take a win if a sniff of one appears, but the Tifosi (fans) haven’t seen one of those since Sainz at Mexico City in October of 02024. Ferrari brings aero updates to Miami this weekend, and the last time a team brought a step-change package to this circuit (McLaren in 02024), it ended up reshaping the title fight. There’s history here that Maranello knows. Whether they execute on it is the question.

In Formula E, the team I’m watching with mixed feelings is the Nissan Formula E Team, who arrive in Berlin defending Oliver Rowland’s first World Championship while currently watching the title fight happen somewhere else entirely. Rowland sits seventh in the standings on 49 points, an uncomfortable 34 behind Wehrlein, with three podiums (São Paulo, Mexico City, and the second Jeddah race) but no wins yet in his title defense. Madrid was a zero-pointer for both Nissans, exactly the kind of weekend a defending champion cannot afford to repeat. Norman Nato has been one of the form qualifiers of the season, but he hasn’t been able to convert that pace into race-day results, and Nissan needs both cars firing if they want to keep pace with Porsche and Jaguar in the Manufacturers’ fight. Berlin, however, is a Nissan-shaped opportunity dressed up as a venue: Tempelhof’s concrete and the brutal energy game are exactly the conditions where a defending champion ought to be able to claw something back. Rowland won here with Nissan in Season 6, Nato took his first-ever Formula E victory on this track in 2021 (with Rowland following him home in second, no less), and the team has had six weeks since Madrid to dig into the data. If the title fight is going to remain a fight in this final GEN3 Evo season, the comeback has to start now, and a Berlin double-header is exactly the right venue to start it. Whether Nismo has the pace to make it count is the only question that matters.

So, here’s to a weekend that, for once, won’t see me up at the Witching Hour to catch the races, with FOUR races to catch!

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