What a tremendous weekend of F1 action, I thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish. This old school, slippery, narrow, and moderately bumpy track with many fast straights and heavy braking zones, tortuous chicanes, and nearby walls, almost always seems to create a thriller with more than a few surprises. We were a little nervous that the 2026 power units might struggle more here than most track layouts this season given so many long straights and less chances to fill the battery, but the teams and drivers are, as expected, quickly adapting and learning how to best use the engine and battery for qualifying, starting the race, restarting after safety cars, and in both attacking and defensive modes.
We can do better yet, but meanwhile, we had a lot of feverish wheel-to-wheel racing, plenty of overtaking where the drivers had to finish the move off on the brakes and corner entries, or defend brutally hard on the straights.
And understanding and explaining the effective ‘Overtaking Mode’, worth about three tenths of a second per lap, is becoming easier to observe and explain. In the end I believe it can be more effective and authentic than ‘DRS’ providing drivers and teams have to work at it and make the moves stick rather than an easy blow by.We also had two qualifying sessions, especially for the main race, which were old school punch and counter punch, and last driver over the finish line knife edge.
The Mercedes car upgrade certainly moved them to the front of the pack again with a small but undeniable advantage, and although the top five were in the same order for both Sprint and main Grand Prix, a third of a second covered the top seven. I really didn’t expect Mercedes, McLaren, Ferrari and Red Bull to be so close so quickly.
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Highlights of the race from the 2026 Canadian Grand Prix
‘Antonelli was always going to run out of track in Sprint’The biggest spoiler of the weekend, for us and not them, was that Mercedes appear to have completely sorted out their starts and in fact George Russell from Sprint pole was best away. We then witnessed the first of two mighty battles between him and championship leader and team-mate Kimi Antonelli. George was marginally more under control and…
2026-05-26 12:00:00
