Coachella, tennis and back to the factory: How drivers and F1 teams are spending the break

Jannik Sinner may have needed a double-take had he looked courtside during his Monte Carlo Masters semifinal against Alexander Zverev last week.

The world’s No 1 men’s tennis player, a huge Formula 1 fan, would have seen Ollie Bearman, Gabriel Bortoleto and Alex Albon — all of whom live in Monaco — sitting together watching him play. After the match, Oscar Piastri joined the trio to meet Sinner, with the Australian also speaking to Carlos Alcaraz shortly afterwards.

On the weekend when they should have been racing in Bahrain, a handful of the drivers were spending their off-time together watching a completely different sport. And it didn’t stop there for Haas driver Bearman, as on Sunday, he made it to the Paris-Roubaix cycling classic to watch his friend, the three-time Tour de France winner Tadej Pogacar, in action.

Even further flung was Lewis Hamilton, who was spotted last weekend at the Coachella music festival in California, alongside Kim Kardashian, watching Justin Bieber’s set.

None of this was planned. Up until this time a month ago, racing was scheduled for Bahrain (April 12) and Saudi Arabia (April 19), only for both grands prix to be called off due to the conflict in the Middle East, leaving a five-week gap in the calendar between the rounds in Japan on March 29 and Miami on May 3.

It’s the largest break in the season, longer even than the four-week summer gap between the Hungarian (July 26) and Dutch (August 23) races. After one of the shortest off-seasons in recent history, it’s badly needed.

“We have some time off for the wrong reasons,” said Andrea Stella, McLaren’s team principal, in a news conference. “But having said that, effectively, because of having been such an intense program, quite pushed from a timeline point of view, actually, this pause is welcomed.”

Typically, the off-season runs from the final race in Abu Dhabi in early December until the end of February, when pre-season testing begins. From 2024 into 2025, there was an 80-day gap between official on-track sessions.

But going into 2026, that fell drastically to just 50 days between the final race in Abu Dhabi on December 7 and the start of the Barcelona test on January 26. And that’s without accounting for early shakedowns or car launches, the first of which took place on January 15.

This was due to the all-new cars needing more preseason testing, so that teams would be fully up to speed by the start of the new season. It left teams facing tight timelines to get their cars ready for the start of testing — something neither Aston Martin nor Williams were able to manage — as well as grappling with the immensely different technical challenge of these cars.

The first benefit of the April break is the chance for all the teams to go back to their factories and knuckle down with car development work.

For those trying to claw back ground, especially Aston and Williams, it’s a welcome opportunity to pour more time and effort into making upgrades that can help their cars go faster, as well as working to remedy some of the issues that have blighted their starts to the year.

Aston and Honda have struggled with an engine vibration problem since the beginning of the campaign, while Williams is struggling with an overweight car.

“It is obviously the same for everyone, but I think, for us, we can take advantage of it a bit more than the others,” Williams driver Albon told reporters. “We’re pushing along hard for this upgrade for Miami, just to get it ready, basically, more than anything else. But, at the same time, you are missing track time, which we do need to explore the car a little bit more.”

Every team — even the dominant Mercedes squad, which has won all three races this season — will be on the same performance push. Unlike the summer break, where there is a mandated two-week shutdown in the regulations that suspends work at the factory, this is time to use effectively.

“It gives us the possibility to make the parts that we want to take trackside to evolve our car, make it faster, especially when it comes to aerodynamic performance,” said Stella, who also said McLaren could use the break to work closer with its engine supplier, Mercedes, to understand how to find more performance from Miami onwards.

The drivers, of course, have their part to play. Many of them will use the downtime to get virtual laps under their belt in the simulator. Bortoleto, who races for Audi, intended to complete programs at the team’s bases in both Switzerland and Germany.

The short winter not only put pressure on the car development, but also on every team member involved in its production and function. The lack of a significant break in traveling, plus the added demands of the new car, came at a cost.

One team member, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect relationships, told The Athletic that those within their traveling trackside team felt “desperate” for a break, and that the winter had felt “non-existent.”

Stella recognized the importance of this break. “It’s been one of the most intense winters that I can remember in my career in Formula 1,” he said. “Definitely, once we started to go trackside, and with winter testing itself, it has been very intense, very busy.”

Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu said that while the break could provide a competitive “opportunity,” a chance to hit pause was important “not just physically, but on a mental side.”

“To prepare the car and make sure it can hit the track, that is a huge pressure. And then to have it reliable, then get the performance out, week in, week out, that’s been a huge mental strain, especially for a small team like us,” Komatsu told reporters. “I think it’s actually very positive to have that month where we don’t need to travel.”

Despite the work at the factory, many teams are using the time to give their dedicated race crews — the mechanics who travel to every race and work on the car — a proper break. Alan Permane, the Racing Bulls team principal, explained that given most of their work away from the track related to reporting on the previous races or preparing for the next one, they could take some proper time off.

“There is naturally a bit of a gap there,” Permane told reporters on Tuesday. “Certainly, traveling people will have some time off, but the rest of the factory (staff members) are actually busier than they would have been.”

But some simply cannot keep themselves away from a race track. Max Verstappen is the highest-profile name busying himself in preparation for his entry to the 24 Hours of Nürburgring next month with his own sports car team.

After taking part in the second race of the Nürburgring Langstrecken-Serie (NLS) season — a sports car series held on the Nürburgring’s 12.9-mile long Nordschleife layout — Verstappen looks set to return to the German circuit this weekend for the qualifiers. He said in Japan that it would “make sense if I can do it” given that only one other member of the four-driver crew is available. “I would feel a bit sorry for him if he would have to do everything by himself,” Verstappen told reporters.

Verstappen isn’t alone in trying a different racing discipline. Last weekend, Lance Stroll was a surprise entry to the GT World Challenge Europe race at Paul Ricard in France, racing an Aston Martin Vantage GT3 car alongside Roberto Merhi and Mari Boya. The trio finished 48th, 15 laps down on the winners, after an array of penalties dented hopes of a good result prior to Stroll getting in the car for his stint.

Although teams are forbidden from conducting any in-season testing with their current cars, there has been a bit of track time on behalf of tire supplier Pirelli. Hamilton completed two days of wet-weather running at Ferrari’s Fiorano test track last week, while McLaren and Mercedes are testing this week, on Tuesday and Wednesday, on the Nürburgring’s shorter grand prix layout.

As these tests are intended to help Pirelli develop its future tire compounds, teams won’t be allowed to conduct their typical setup changes or adjust run plans as they would in pre-season testing, yet it is nevertheless a good opportunity to have some more mileage with their new cars.

Away from the track, drivers will look to strike a balance between a good block of physical training — easier to complete without the usual travel — and unwinding.

“This off-season was a difficult one to navigate because of how short it was,” McLaren’s Oscar Piastri said in an interview with The Athletic in Japan.

“Trying to fit in processing last year, spending time with my family, spending time with my friends, spending time in the sun, spending time physically training, and then coming back to work, it was a lot to do in about two weeks.”

There’s also the kind of boring life admin that even F1 drivers must complete. Liam Lawson arguably had the longest journey of anyone in this break, returning to his native New Zealand for a week to get a new passport, as well as seeing his family and some old friends.

“It was successful, so I can now travel for the rest of the season, which is great,” Lawson told reporters of his passport renewal. “We fill up pages pretty quickly; it’s the second time I’ve needed to do this now.”

But even in this break, there’s no escape from the parts of the job that drivers are less enthusiastic about, with Piastri wryly adding that McLaren would “fill (the gap) with marketing days that I would have done later in the year.

“I’m not joking, unfortunately, with that.”

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