A unique grand prix on the Formula 1 calendar throws up some unique driving challenges, and brand new rules for Monaco in 2026 means we're even seeing some unique car design tweaks too!

From throwback rear wing 'winglets' to unusual energy management challenges, via bad gearbox downshifts that leave one driver fearing his team might not be able to race at all this weekend (can you guess who?), here's everything we learned on day one of the 2026 Monaco Grand Prix.

Aston Martin's 'random' downshift crash risk

Fernando Alonso warns that Aston Martin may not even be able to race given the crash risk if there is a repeat of what he calls the "random downshift" issue it has experienced recently.

"If you have the downshift problem like we had in Miami, probably we cannot even race, because we will crash in one of the braking points due to a very different downshift type," said Alonso.

He described the drivers as "passengers" if there's a downshift that creates a push effect from the engine "like going on full throttle".

"Monaco is not the place to have a random downshift," he said. "Then you will crash into the wall, and the driver will look stupid."

There is also a second Monaco-specific problem. Lance Stroll revealed Aston Martin loses gear sync every time the car drops below around 40km/h, not good news given the Loews (Fairmont) Hairpin is the slowest corner on the calendar.

"Every time we go through Loews Hairpin, we’re going to lose sync completely of the gears," said Stroll.

And losing gear synch costs laptime, something struggling Aston Martin-Honda does not have to spare. - Edd Straw

Leclerc had two reasons for Ferrari deal

Charles Leclerc revealed his two reasons for signing the new Ferrari deal that was announced on Wednesday were "because I love this team and because I believe in the project".

Confidence in team principal Fred Vasseur is the reason for his certainty that Ferrari's seemingly never-ending mission to re-emerge as a title winner will pay off.

"With Fred, we have a very good relationship and I strongly believe that he's the person that will be able to bring Ferrari back to the top," said Leclerc.

Leclerc also indicated loyalty was part of his decision, referring to Ferrari as "one of the first to believe in me and to help me get to where I am today". But there is a caveat that suggests the 28-year-old has not been so foolish as to commit what could be the peak of his career to Ferrari without some kind of get out.

"I cannot go too much into the detail of the contract, so I cannot comment," he said when asked about conditions in the contract related to his timeline for success. "But surely, it's part of those discussions."

He also confirmed there were other, unspecified options, which is exactly what you would expect for a driver of his calibre whose management will always be in contact with potential suitors.

"I'm not going to say who, they can say if they want," Leclerc said of these other teams. "But for me, Ferrari was always the choice." - ES

Bottas addresses 'bulls**t' rumours he's at risk

Another race weekend, another driver having to address "complete bulls**t" rumours that their place on the grid is at risk.

In Canada, the snowball effect of misquoted and/or mistranslated comments left Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu asking "how is that journalism?" about "just f***ing bulls**t gossip" that he and Esteban Ocon had fallen out and that a mid-season split was possible. Ocon was similarly forthright and spoke of the "damage" such speculation can cause.

Valtteri Bottas was more contained in that regard as he faced the unenviable task of responding to comments about his own Cadillac future, but it was little surprise he found himself reaching for the expletive.

"It's part of the sport. It's not the first time I faced those kind of rumours," said Bottas, when asked how annoyed he'd been. "It's a bit of a shame that somebody's just made [up] some complete bulls**t, but that's normal in this sport."

Bottas suspected "headlines, clicks" were the goal of that speculation but said Cadillac "know my situation" and that the team "support me 100%, so that's why from my side it was OK in the end".

Those reports came in the wake of a Canada weekend where he was clearly second-best to team-mate Sergio Perez, alongside whom Bottas has made an unconvincing start to the season.

Bottas was eight-and-a-half tenths off Perez in both sprint and grand prix qualifying in Montreal - but said he and Cadillac had spotted discrepancies that would at the very least have exaggerated that gap.

"I caught up with the team last week about it and we could see issues, both on the PU [power unit] side and the car-build side," he said. "That's as much as I can give you, but we can see reasons, which is good to see.

"But we need to keep working on the quality, on how we build the car, how we fit all the parts and so on."

It might not surprise you that Bottas called those car-build issues "understandable" for a new team but, considering it's something he and Perez have both mentioned, he could really do with Cadillac getting on top of that sooner rather than later for his own sake. - Jack Cozens

Novel rear wing designs for most, but not all...

The high-downforce demands of Monaco have prompted some crazy wing ideas in the past - and this year has not disappointed either.

Attention was caught on Thursday when a host of teams revealed some left-field new winglet solutions fitted to their rear wings.

They were all a consequence of the FIA's decision to remove active aero for this weekend on the grounds that it would not bring much benefit and could trigger some safety concerns.

With active aero off the cars, teams no longer need their moveable wing devices - and that has opened the door for clever thinking to replace the actuators with something that adds downforce.

Mercedes, McLaren and Red Bull led the way with some pretty interesting and complex solutions for the new winglets, while others including Audi, Racing Bulls, Ferrari and Cadillac all had simpler solutions attached to their upper flaps.

But while the designs grabbed attention and got tongues wagging, nobody believes that the winglets are going to shake up the order much.

At best the wings deliver a few hundredths of a second benefit - the kind of marginal gains that Aston Martin and Haas felt was not worth pursuing.

But let's see what the final grid is, and how much pole position is won by, before concluding whether or not the efforts have been worth it or a waste of time. - Jon Noble

Hamilton says he's found his 'Italian Bono'

Lewis Hamilton's 2026 season is going much better than his 2025 one, and although that's in large part due to the super-stiff, difficult-to-feel-under-braking ground-effect cars he so detests being consigned to history, he feels there's also been a huge amount of unseen work "in the background" at Ferrari to get his side of the garage into a much more productive state.

This is certainly about Hamilton becoming more comfortable in his new environment and beginning to assert himself more (as every driver must do). We've learned recently that Hamilton has reverted to his old habits of trying to ignore the team simulator, and he also claims credit for helping develop new Ferrari suspension that he hopes will pay back particularly around the unforgiving streets of Monte Carlo.

But it's also been about the fostering of crucial relationships within the team. Hamilton's first Ferrari season began with several high-profile miscommunications, often involving Riccardo Adami - who worked with Carlos Sainz for four seasons before Hamilton took Sainz's seat.

One of the most bizarre of those occurred 12 months ago in Monaco, where Hamilton finished a long way behind the lead group and was met with radio silence on the slowing down lap.

Following a mid-season engineering reshuffle on his side of the garage, Hamilton feels things are now working much better - so much so that he's calling his current race engineer, Carlos Santi, "my Italian Bono", in reference to Peter Bonnington, the famous Mercedes engineer who guided Hamilton to six of his seven F1 world championship titles.

"Having that driver-engineer collab, it's hit and miss sometimes," Hamilton said. "With me and Bono, we hit it right from the beginning. I do feel like Carlos is like my Italian Bono - I told Bono that the other day - in terms of, he's a bit of an OG [original gangster]. He's an older guy that's been around the block.

"The engineer set-up is a million times better than it was last year. I'm starting to see the fruits of that through driving the car." - Ben Anderson

Alpine investigates mysterious Gasly issues

Alpine's been investigating Pierre Gasly's sudden balance issues in the last two F1 races and has something different to try this weekend - although there is a difference in characterisation from driver and team.

While Gasly claims "we can see clearly stuff on my side of the garage which is not really working the way they should", and there are "a lot of things to test this weekend", what Alpine has uncovered is described as quite minor.

It has left no stone unturned looking into Gasly's issues, and reverted some small items to how they were before the April break. The hope is this will have a bigger impact on car balance than Alpine expects but it may be that Gasly has simply been thrown disproportionately by a small change in feeling.

If it is more driver mentality, it could be the inverse of what has happened on the other side of the garage. Franco Colapinto has been aided by a fractionally lighter chassis and some part changes in the last couple of races but not enough to explain his sudden leap in form - so what he calls feeling "much more connected to the car" could be more down to him figuring a few things out than the car being significantly better. - Scott Mitchell-Malm

Sainz started to doubt Williams could do the job

"Tested my faith? For sure."

Carlos Sainz hasn't hidden his frustration with Williams's start to 2026 at any point so far this season. But his media session on Thursday in Monaco did provide one big revelation.

The four-time grand prix winner has regularly referred to Williams's competitive reality this year being a "bump" in the road in its plan to return to the sharp end, but it was in response to that reference that he was asked whether his faith in the Williams project had been tested.

"When you go from scoring podiums at the end of last year to suddenly being where we were two seconds and a half of the pace at the beginning of the year, two seconds is a big test of faith or a big shock to the system," he said.

"And I was the first one to say to James [Vowles] and to the management that it was not expected."

Whether that was the extent of what Sainz wanted to say we can't be sure; his pivot to a more positive tone, about how the bump shocked Williams into action it otherwise might not have known needed taking, coincided with Williams's press officer jokingly bringing it to his attention that team principal James Vowles was nearby.

But it definitely shed a bit more light on how frustrating this has been for Sainz - a driver who's trying desperately hard to remain patient but who ultimately wants to see a return on the investment he's made as soon as possible. - JC

Drivers might have too much energy

For once, all the engine and battery-related talk ahead of a 2026 F1 race has been about having lots of energy and maximum power usage.

That's because the Monaco layout makes it easy to charge the battery and a new power cap to keep speeds from getting dangerously high means spending energy on MGU-K power deployment will be lower than normal.

However, there can be such a thing as too much energy! These regulations really do get you coming and going...

The slow-speed layout will be tough for the engine's turbos to maintain the required boost pressure for optimal torque delivery on corner exit - except for those with Ferrari engines thanks to their smaller turbos, which spin to the required speed easier.

When this turbo lag occurs, though, it can be 'filled in' with power derived from the MGU-K when it is harvesting energy. And around Monaco this should be quite easy because there's such an abundance of energy that using the battery for this purpose doesn't come at the normal cost.

Except you can't charge the battery if it's at 100%. And the first half of the Monaco lap is such that there's a real chance the cars get to Portier, the corner before the longest straight through the tunnel, with the battery at maximum capacity.

The Mercedes-engined teams seem particularly wary of this challenge, and are talking about finding ways to mitigate this - maybe by spending as much energy as possible on some very short bursts of straight.

Otherwise they could find themselves hemorrhaging laptime down one of the few straights Monaco has thanks to a slow exit with a struggling turbo. And that comes just a couple of corners after the ultra low-speed hairpin, which will present a similar problem... - SMM

Real Haas weakness unrelated to tricky upgrade debut

Haas is optimistic it will give a better account of its upgraded F1 car this weekend after the debut of its package in Canada was undermined by an early, unrelated issue.

Ollie Bearman revealed that Haas was briefly scared the upgrade was slower than the old specification in Canada FP1, before the team discovered a different part was not performing as it should.

Unfortunately this meant Haas had already gone down a compromised path. It was not until main qualifying that Bearman unlocked the set-up that brought more out of the car but struggled with the handling characteristics that came with this, as Haas was effectively three sessions behind where it should have been.

Haas believes a tricky Miami weekend before Canada had already been a warning of some limitations that existed in the car and while these may have been further exposed by the upgrade, it was more the demands of the Montreal circuit that brought out corner-entry nervousness and mid-corner understeer.

So while it believes the car will be in a better window this weekend it is also starting a medium-to-long-term development plan to address the weaknesses it now better understands. - SMM