Why the real F1 pecking order won't be seen until Barcelona at the earliest

With Formula 1’s modern calendars filled with back-to-back races, getting to the end of May and starting the fifth round of the year is partly a quirk of the schedule and also partly down to the pair of cancelled races in the Middle East, which left April vacant.

Still, even if the Canadian Grand Prix held its original number in the F1 calendar of round seven, the campaign would still be in its infancy given the 24-round marathon that is grand prix racing in the 2020s.

And at the start of the new regulations era, particularly one with rules being chopped and changed, trying to establish the pecking order was always going to be a tall order. Add in the swings in performance created by teams delivering upgrade packages at different times, then decoding a pattern is, at best, educated guesswork.

But the premature state of the 2026 F1 season isn’t the only reason why an established order will not form until later in the season.

Canada and Monaco are outlier tracks

Montreal’s Circuit Gilles Villeneuve is a revered track on the F1 calendar given its history, city-adjacent location and challenge for the drivers. Its importance to F1 and Liberty was clear given how cooperatively it worked with organisers to find a space in the calendar during its push to group races by regions to reduce freight costs, human impact and transport emissions.

As a result, the Canadian GP is three weeks earlier than 2025 to sit the other side of the Monaco and Barcelona pairing and adjoin it to Miami – albeit with a two-week break in between.

Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari, Oscar Piastri, McLaren, Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes

Photo by: James Sutton / Motorsport Images via Getty Images

Those 21 days will mean, in normal circumstances, the weather will be slightly cooler in Montreal at an already chillier than the average F1 race (Silverstone and Zandvoort currently fight for that title), meaning temperatures and conditions aren’t entirely representative to the norm of the bulk of the calendar.

This was evidenced in the previous ground effects era when Mercedes, which had a car able to excel in cooler conditions, dominated in Canada as the frontrunning McLaren and Red Bull packages struggled.

Montreal’s lack of high-speed corners is also a less common feature, with long straights punctuated by stop-start chicanes and hairpins. F1’s variety of circuits are meant to pose a range of challenges to cars at each weekend, so this is no bad thing, but in terms of design and behaviour, having a car that performs best when it is able to smack on the downforce is a preferred characteristic.

Indeed, Monaco is the opposite of that, with no long straights and no high-speed corners – at least in relative terms to your Maggotts and your Becketts – and a race that is decided on the Saturday in qualifying. Race pace analysis is a frivolous task at best when it comes to the Principality.

Barcelona will be the first track F1 returns to in 2026 

It feels like a lifetime ago, but the new era of F1 started on the final week of January at a cold and, at times, wet Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya. F1’s preferred European destination for pre-season testing, it was the ideal place for teams to get to grips with the new cars, engines and rules in a five-day, behind closed door shakedown in which each team was permitted to run for three of those days. All bar Aston Martin (one-and-a-bit days) and Williams (no days) completed that test before heading on to the pair of official test in Bahrain.

Due to the cancellation of the Bahrain GP due to the outbreak of war in the Middle East, F1 didn’t return to Sakhir for the first race at a winter testing venue. That moniker goes to Barcelona – but the conditions will be night and day given the expected sweltering conditions in Catalunya in mid-June.

Franco Colapinto, Alpine

Photo by: TJWB Photography

Conditions aside – and putting Aston Martin and Williams and their own situations to one side for the moment – this will be the first time teams run their cars at the same track for a second time. This means correlation and significant data can be logged to compare how their cars have development from that January outing and where each team stacks up relatively to the very, very early days of the season.

On top of that, Barcelona offers a variety of low, medium and fast corners, plus the lengthy start/finish straight, to give teams the chance to fully push their cars in real-world conditions, which (if we add Miami to the ‘not so normal’ track pile) haven’t been experienced since the Japanese GP back in late March.

Upgrades, upgrades, upgrades

With teams delivering update packages of different sizes and at different rounds, performance swings have come with a footnote. For example, Mercedes held back its big upgrade package for Montreal while McLaren and many rivals were able to close the gap with a significant package in Miami.

Given the development paths and rules that are still so fresh, gaps will grow and shrink throughout the year, but there’s a recognised expectation that minimal-to-zero upgrades will land in Monaco with teams targeting Barcelona as a next stop on the calendar to deliver. When the Montmelo track used to host the first European race of the season in early May it was a hotbed for upgrades, and the same can be anticipated despite Monaco technically being the first stop on F1’s European summer tour.

This new era of F1 will remain unpredictable for a little while longer.