Rob Smedley sounds alarm on "slightly soul-destroying" Ferrari F1 upgrades

Former Formula 1 engineer Rob Smedley has branded Ferrari's Miami Grand Prix upgrades as "slightly soul-destroying" after McLaren saw a larger boost in performance than the Maranello outfit. 

After a strong start to 2026, including Lewis Hamilton's first podium finish with Ferrari at the Chinese Grand Prix, McLaren closed the gap to the Fred Vasseur-led team with second and third-place finishes at the Miami Grand Prix with substantial upgrades. Ferrari now has only a 16-point lead over the Woking outfit. 

Speaking on the High Performance Racing podcast alongside former Alpine team principal Otmar Szafnauer, Smedley responded when asked how disappointing it would be for Ferrari to come under threat from McLaren after introducing upgrades.

"100%. It's slightly soul-destroying because it starts from a technical point of view. It starts essentially this negative loop that you've then got to [dissect]. What did you bring? What's working? What's not working?

"If it's not correlating, as in the wind tunnel or your simulation tools are not matching what's on track, you've then got to do this whole reverse engineering process where you go back to the tunnel, and that holds up all of the development in the tunnel that you should be doing."

Szafnauer added: "There are two things that happen. You have finite resources, and now you're putting those resources on correlation, not making the car go faster. And the reason you're doing that is because if you don't have good correlation, it's only luck that you make the car go faster, right?

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari, Lando Norris, McLaren

Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images

"So you've got to fix that, if that's what their issue is, first and foremost. But the same engineers who would be looking at on-track performance are now looking at correlation issues.

"There are some different teams that have different groups, but when I was at Aston and Racing Point and Force India, we had a pretty big APG group, which is an aeroperformance group, and they were the people who would look at correlation, mainly, not so much development but correlation.

"When I went to Alpine, they had like three. That was one of the things I thought to myself as not being enough. If you've got perfect correlation, no problem. But if you wake up and you don't and you only have three people in APG, you're going to struggle.

"Then what happens is just what I described. You get your aerodynamicist looking at correlation, and now they're not looking at making the car go faster. So it is a problem."