F1 Miami Grand Prix: Take a hot lap at 166 mph (and no turn signals)

MIAMI GARDENS — My driver offered to take it easy.

He was proposing we just do a “warm” lap, conjuring images of Canadian tourists cruising A1A during the season.

I was there for a hot lap.

One time around the entire 19-turn circuit for the Formula 1 Grand Prix of Miami near top speed.

One lap to erase the memory of my 2025 trip around the circuit, which taught me a great deal about the guys who turn in sizzling hot laps on Sunday afternoons.

The Palm Beach Post's Hal Habib prepares for a hot lap at the Miami Grand Prix on May 1, 2026.

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If you’re among those wondering if these drivers are athletes, a couple of the most educational minutes of your life would be spent doing a hot lap. You’ll leave trying to grasp how those guys handle it, lap after lap, for 90 solid minutes. And how they don’t climb out of their cars babbling so incoherently even Stephen A. Smith would cringe.

Our morning started with the welcoming people at Pirelli, led by Alan Van Der Merwe, a former British Formula 3 champion. He explained we would be experiencing 1g forces as our cars whipped around turns — and that when drivers are racing, the forces on their bodies are more like 5g.

“I just hope you haven’t had a big breakfast,” said Mika Hakkinen, who won F1 world titles in 1998 and 1999.

I’d had a small breakfast: 25 mg of meclizine hydrochloride, better known as Dramamine, for motion sickness. Had I taken it before my hot lap last year, I might not have spent the next three days in bed with my brains resembling scrambled eggs prematurely removed from the frying pan.

The organizers of the event came to me this year asking if I’d be interested in a return engagement, knowing that since I didn’t have scrambled eggs for brains, I’d chuckle or come at them with a frying pan. At least that’s what they thought.