Luke Smith

well it's been very much a boom or bust for uh yeah poor oscar failed to start either of the first two races uh spun out in that heartbreaking fashion in australia then uh an issue on his car in china and then in japan he puts in probably one of the best performances of his f1 career like

I saw an interview where he said that it's probably better than half of his race wins in F1 purely because he got every little ounce out of the car to finish second.

And it was a really good display.

So I think it's definitely showing the Oscars there.

He's still got the spark that made him such a force through points of last season.

And I think given the right car underneath him, he can definitely try and lead McLaren's charge going into this next phase of the year.

But I think the outlook after Japan is much better than it was after those first few races, because I think two races, two failures to start.

There was a few concerns and question marks over when is Oscar finally going to get back to his groove and get some luck.

Yeah, it's been nice to have a bit of a break.

I think everyone was quite exhausted in F1 after such a busy winter, but no, it's been good for a bit of downtime.

I've been to a couple of the F1 factories just to see what they're getting up to, but also been nice to spend some time on the golf course as well and try and get my handicap down a little bit.

Yeah, it is.

Yeah, we don't normally get these big breaks so early.

We have the summer break, which is a good chance for everyone to kind of rest right in the middle of the season.

But after only three races and so many unknowns still about F1 in 2026, it's been quite hard to put everything on pause.

And it's given the teams a bit of a chance to go away, knuckle down and maybe start a whole new season in their eyes from Miami this weekend.

Well, one of the big things has been the rule tweaks that we're going to see for the Miami Grand Prix onwards.

And F1's coming for a lot of criticism, I think it's fair to say, with these new cars that they've got in place for 2026.

A lot of focus placed on battery and energy management and lots of talk about megajoules and super clipping and this kind of jargon that's come into F1's world, basically.

But the drivers, they weren't happy with some of the things they had to do behind the wheel.