After a bit of a mixed bag of an opening race in Melbourne, the 2026 season really came alive for me at the Chinese Grand Prix. Largely because it produced better racing and storylines, but I won't pretend that the fact that I had to set an alarm for 7am rather than 4am didn't play a part. Trying to get your head around super clipping and active aero on three hours of sleep is brutal stuff.
Even if I was battling sleep deprivation again, though, I think the race in Shanghai would've had me wide awake before long, producing a new winner and some wild wheel-to-wheel racing.
These are my main takeaways from it.
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Antonelli more than just second fiddle
How good an F1 season is when one team has a much better car than the rest largely depends on how good that team's second driver is; whether they'll challenge their teammate for the title as Oscar Piastri did, or let that teammate dominate all season as Sergio Perez did. Which camp Kimi Antonelli will fall into this year is tough to call, but there were some very exciting signs in its second round.
Granted, George Russell's weekend was derailed by a mechanical issue in qualifying, but how Antonelli took advantage of that was still massively impressive. He produced an excellent lap to become the youngest pole-sitter of a main race ever, kept his cool to hold off Charles Leclerc and get back ahead of Lewis Hamilton at the start of that race, and then never looked back.
Russell would've obviously been a much bigger threat if he qualified higher and didn't have to spend time battling the Ferraris, but even when he was past them and in clean air, he wasn't able to close the gap to the race leader. There was nothing to suggest the Brit would've comfortably seen off the other Mercedes had things been smoother for him, such was Antonelli's pace.
That probably won't be the case at every round this season, with Antonelli much less developed than Russell and Toto Wolff unlikely to let an intra-team battle emerge, but the fact that the Italian is already able to go toe to toe with a driver as good as Russell on his day, at just 19 years of age, is really something.
With all due respect to the Mexican, Kimi Antonelli is no Sergio Perez.
Thrilling Ferrari fight provides hope for new era
Sunday's race would've put a smile on the face of many an Italian, and not just because they saw one of their own win a race for the first time in 20 years.
Behind Antonelli, Hamilton's resurgence continued, with the veteran more than a match for Leclerc for the second race in a row, and that led to an absolutely thrilling battle that provided real hope for both fans of Ferrari and F1's new era.
The drivers swapped places numerous times as they fought for third, and not just because of energy deployment. They were going side by side in areas of the track where it wasn't really a factor, and that's thanks to the new rules.
In the previous era, cars struggled too much in dirty air to follow each other closely for extended periods of time, and were too wide and heavy to be able to go through tight sections alongside each other without making contact. Now that they're narrower, nimbler and produce less disruptive air, they can run much closer to each other, and that played a huge part in Hamilton and Leclerc producing some of the best racing the sport has seen in recent years.
Their battle was a good sign for F1 for another reason too, because it showed that Ferrari have two drivers performing at an extremely high level, in a car that does exactly what they want it to through the corners. As a result, there's every reason to believe that they can really take the fight to Mercedes if they can improve their power unit.
Verstappen coming across a sore loser
The battle between Hamilton and Leclerc, as well as the scraps they had with the Mercedes drivers, thrilled many a fan, but according to Max Verstappen, "If someone likes this, then you really don't know what racing is like," which bothered me a bit.
The Dutchman has been critical of the new rules since the start of the season, and I think he's been right in a lot of what he's said, but he doesn't really have the right to tell fans what they should and shouldn't be enjoying.
Like him, many miss the sound of V8 engines and the sight of faster cars, and that's fine, but many aren't fussed about that and simply enjoy watching drivers fight for position, and that's fine too. There's not an objectively superior form of racing that people have to like and an objectively inferior form of racing that they have to dislike for them to be "real" fans.
I also think Verstappen's claim that he dislikes the new rules not because they've sent him tumbling down the grid, but instead because he just loves Formula 1 and wants the best for it, is a load of rubbish, to be frank.
If that was the case, if he really cared about the quality of F1 more than his own personal success, why didn't he speak up when rules were broken to set up an exciting finish to the 2021 season? In doing that, F1 created racing more artificial than any produced by a battery pack, infuriated millions of fans and massively damaged their own reputation. For an answer to that question, you need only look at who became world champion as a result of that scandal.
Making uncharacteristic mistakes in a car that's lacking both pace and reliability, Verstappen is just extremely unhappy with how the new era is going for him so far. He'd be singing a very different tune if he got the Mercedes move he reportedly wanted last year.
