From major variations in Formula 1 team-mate fortunes to a lot of missed opportunities in a single weekend, here’s everything we learned from a very eventful Canadian Grand Prix.
Two totally different Ferrari weekends in one
Canada was Charles Leclerc’s self-described worst weekend in F1, at the same time that Lewis Hamilton seemed to be enjoying his best with Ferrari.
Leclerc had zero feeling with the car from the first lap of Friday practice to the last lap of the race. On Friday it was the brakes, as he described getting into corners and hoping he didn’t go straight. In qualifying it was the tyres, and the threat was either the wall or eighth place.
In the race, he spent the final 15 laps driving one to one and a half seconds off the pace just to avoid crashing, still finding moments that were “too close for comfort”. Fourth place was “more out of luck than a reward of my hard work” he said afterwards.
He attributed it partly to his driving style never having suited Montreal’s corner rhythm, but that was about it. Leclerc also admitted the most difficult weekend of his career was juxtaposed sharply against an “absolutely incredible” Hamilton.
The seven-time champion arrived having spent his preparation not in the simulator but deeper in the data, and claimed he chose a set-up Ferrari had never tried before, which transformed the car from the first session. By Sunday he was hunting down Max Verstappen for second place, relishing every lap, and describing a feeling he hadn’t had all season.
Hamilton was clear he still sees value in the simulator for deployment work and correlation, but it was specifically his personal driving preparation where he’s now convinced old-school suits him better.
We’ve seen false dawns in the Hamilton-Ferrari relationship before, so his task is to sustain it. At least for Leclerc he should shrug this off quite quickly – as he does have the odd weekend in no-man’s land when he’s struggling for the right feeling on a low-grip surface.
Mercedes will intervene with warring drivers
Mercedes has painful experience of an intra-team title fight descending into destructive internal rivalry.
Its determination not to let George Russell versus Kimi Antonelli end up in Hamilton versus Nico Rosberg territory, and not to risk letting any of the rivals that aren’t actually that far behind its drivers in the championship back into the fight, was very evident in Canada.
It made sure Russell and Antonelli knew that being allowed to race each other hard was a privilege, not a right, with its firm “if we can’t keep it tidy then we’ll have to stop you racing” message to both drivers.
And that approach extended to trying to squash any narrative of intra-team tension building, with a ‘nothing to see here’ or ‘we’ve had much worse’ tone from Toto Wolff in some media appearances that was at odds with the tone of some of his radio interventions.
Mercedes doesn’t want its drivers risking taking each other out, it doesn’t want the world hearing them lashing out at each other on team radio, and it doesn’t want to give the media a chance to stir it all either.
Wolff did admit after the grand prix that Mercedes got “close a few times” to situations that could have taken both cars out, and that internal conversations would focus on when close racing becomes too close and when it’s best not to – as he put it – “elaborate on emotions” over the radio.
At least it has a little bit of headroom to work with after Russell’s retirement made it clearly advantage Antonelli with a 43-point lead. So it’ll probably take a little while before this fight gets back into ‘each race could swing the balance of power’ territory.
Red Bull’s breakthrough was flattered
Red Bull’s definitely a part of the lead group again, and a direct Ferrari threat, having “cracked quite fundamental issues” since the start of the season according to team principal Laurent Mekies.
But while Verstappen’s first podium of 2026 represented genuine progress it was aided by Russell’s retirement and McLaren’s strategic misfire, and it did flatter a difficult weekend.
Verstappen admitted he felt more comfortable back in Miami. He made the best of it in Montreal but the car didn’t make it easy and he was unhappy with some of Red Bull’s choices through the weekend.
Isack Hadjar had a harder time still. He looked strong on Saturday: confident, close to Verstappen, happy with the set-up work done overnight despite arguably underachieving in Q3. But then he described reverting almost entirely to his Friday feeling by Sunday, unable to explain where the pace had gone – and picked up a needless penalty for a dodgy swerve on Leclerc.
This was definitely another weekend in a better direction for Red Bull but it hammered home part of its Miami message that there are clearly still improvements to be made.
Keeping these engines will cost F1 Verstappen
While words are cheap, sources close to Verstappen insist he is dead serious in his claim in Canada that if F1’s rules do not change for next year then he will walk away.
Such is his dislike of the scale of energy management with the current generation of cars he’d rather go off and have fun elsewhere than go through what he described as the mental torment of putting up with something he just does not like.
So a lot is riding on the FIA and F1’s efforts to try to put together a package of rules tweaks that can move the current 50/50 power split between combustion engine and battery towards 60/40.
The move does not yet have the necessary support of four of the six car manufacturers that will be required for a super majority, but there appears to be some room for negotiation that could open the door for Audi and Honda at least to join Mercedes and Red Bull in backing it.
It is in Red Bull’s interest for the change to happen so it can keep hold of its star asset, and Mekies is convinced that common sense will prevail and everyone will in the end go for what’s best for F1.
Albon can’t catch a break
If it’s not one thing for Alex Albon this year, it’s another. A weekend that started with the “freak accident” of striking a groundhog and crashing out of the only practice session – which also forced him to miss sprint qualifying – ended with Oscar Piastri spearing him early in the grand prix.
Albon felt he was making good progress through the field before that, and was close to fighting for a points-paying position. He was measured about the Piastri clash and said there wasn’t malicious intent – which was obvious, as Piastri seemingly lost all grip while two cars back and cleaned out the helpless Albon with a huge hit to the side.
Above all else, Albon feels he just needs more time in the car than he’s currently managing.
“We’ve got a tricky car and we’re also not getting many laps to learn from it,” he said. For example, In Canada he felt he was still learning deployment management even on lap 12 of the race. Which was just when Piastri ploughed into him.
The combination of reliability issues, accidents and disrupted weekends has left Albon consistently on the back foot with barely any uninterrupted running while team-mate Carlos Sainz has managed three points finishes.
Development war proves inconclusive
Mercedes brought its first major upgrade of the 2026 season to Canada, one race after McLaren, Ferrari and Red Bull did so in Miami.
The upgrade comprised changes to the front wing, front wing endplates, front and rear corner assemblies, floorboard, floor corner and floor body.
But despite continuing to dominate with a race pace advantage reckoned to be around three tenths of a second per lap, Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff said the upgrade hasn’t yet proved completely convincing.
He expects the picture to become more clear with time, albeit with the caveat that the next track in Monaco won’t be a good test. And it’s not that the upgrade didn’t work as such, simply that Mercedes isn’t certain it has delivered as big a step as anticipated.
On the plus side, it has made tweaks to improve its starts, which paid off in Montreal. That includes Antonelli having a modified clutch paddle to improve his sensitivity and consistency.
Rival McLaren effectively completed its Miami upgrade in Montreal by introducing a new front wing design, a new halo winglet, and updates to the coke bottle/engine cover, floor edges and rear suspension.
However, like Mercedes it proved inconclusive. McLaren took the front wing off its cars after free practice pending further running in upcoming races.
Where Cadillac is ‘lacking tremendously’
The evidence of Cadillac’s first F1 season so far suggests its car itself is progressing faster than the team operations around it.
This was a great weekend for Cadillac in terms of being a bigger nuisance to others in the midfield. Sergio Perez led the charge and has spoken encouragingly about the performance trajectory but Canada also exposed the gap between potential and delivery in stark terms.
After wrongly gambling on intermediates at the start, Perez recovered well through the field before a freak suspension failure ended his race. In the end there wasn’t an unlikely point to be grabbed here even in a grand prix of high attrition but easily Cadillac’s best result so far went begging.
“Operationally we are lacking tremendously,” Perez said afterwards. “We are not maximising the results.”
On operations – whether that’s strategy calls, reliability, or the mechanical execution of a race weekend – Perez said he is impatient. Some growing pains are inevitable but the margin for the kind of costly mistakes that defined Canada is shrinking fast.
Alpine drivers have traded lives
In the first races before F1’s April break, the dynamic at Alpine followed most of last year’s: Pierre Gasly was the established, faster side of the garage, and Franco Colapinto was struggling to piece things together.
After Colapinto flipped the script in Miami, he proved it was no one-off in Canada. Right now the two drivers have traded lives because it’s not just that Colapinto’s quick and Alpine has two drivers in the mix – Colapinto’s thriving and Gasly’s struggling.
Colapinto had a tricky sprint qualifying after losing most of free practice due to a technical problem but was still faster than Gasly, then raced strongly to a point-less ninth in the race. He built on this with a Q3 result in main qualifying, which he turned into more points on Sunday – although got lucky to escape running off track in the pit exit and bumping the wall.
Gasly, meanwhile, was on the back foot all weekend and continued a miserable narrative from Miami – as he said “I’m absolutely nowhere” since Alpine upgraded its car.
He clawed back to eighth in the Canada race, but was mainly aided by attrition, and continued after to vaguely allude to feeling something in the car and seeing something in the data that isn’t right.
After Alpine spent the earlier part of the season managing noise from Colapinto’s fanbase, which directed sabotage accusations at the team amid his difficult results, now it’s Gasly who is scratching his head wondering what’s going on.
Key McLaren weakness has lingered into 2026
While McLaren has faced accusations of being too cautious with its strategy at times in the recent past, it certainly diverged from the pack in Canada as the only frontrunning team to start on intermediates.
But with pre-race drizzle having eased off, Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri’s doubts were obvious as early as the formation laps.
McLaren was open afterwards that it made a mistake, but was also adamant its decisions needed to be judged based on the information available at the time.
With drizzle coming in, it felt warming up the slicks with the unknown quantity of 2026 cars in the wet could have been a nightmare.
It also argued there was a chance going for the inters could have paid off better if the start hadn’t been delayed.
The six-minute window between when the original start would have been and when the race eventually got going – after Arvid Lindblad’s stranded car was removed – did shift things much more towards the slicks.
Without that delay, perhaps the whole picture would be completely different – McLaren mused as much anyway.
Some of its rivals were quick to dismiss that; they said they knew once the tyre blankets came off that McLaren had made a big blunder.
Aston Martin has unusual new reliability problem
Aston Martin and Honda started 2026 with vibration problems regularly shaking car parts or drivers into retirement.
But Fernando Alonso’s exit from the Canadian GP was for something totally different: a problem with his seat, “where I feel more and more uncomfortable with the laps”.
While Alonso would not go into too many details about what had happened, just that the position wasn’t right, Aston Martin later elaborated on it being a problem that may need a design tweak.
As part of a deliberate trend to make the drivers’ seating positions as optimal as possible for car performance, the seating position has been rotated backwards. This means both Alonso and Lance Stroll are laying back more than before.
This appears to have triggered a pinch point somewhere for Alonso, which only fully manifested itself in the race to the point where he could not continue in Montreal.
It should be fixable in the short term and will be a focus prior to the next race in Monaco.
Midfield decided by luck not judgement
Audi started both drivers on intermediates, which immediately undermined their race having lined up on the grid with Nico Hulkenberg and Gabriel Bortoleto on the fringes of the points.
Hulkenberg also picked up a penalty for speeding in the pitlane, and had a spin in the race. Another poor start for Bortoleto in the sprint race part of the weekend was a frustrating repeat of the car’s known weakness at launches too.
Having needed a cleaner weekend, Audi’s ended up with poor execution again. This time not through operational, engineering or mechanical limitations as such but poor decisions and driving errors married to its known problems.
That’s a missed opportunity given the attrition of this race, and how much of the midfield result was determined more by luck than judgement.
Racing Bulls and Haas were able to come away with points finishes but only because others dropped out.
Linbdlad was excellent all weekend but Racing Bulls lost him at the start with a problem on the grid. Team-mate Liam Lawson wasn’t particularly happy despite finishing seventh, as the race pace just wasn’t there – so this team didn’t fully capitalise on its upgraded car being really strong over one lap in particular, as it seemed to fire up its tyres well in cold conditions.
Haas, meanwhile, had myriad problems all weekend with its new upgrade package – which seemed to introduce some troubling characteristics and left the team on the back foot in terms of set-up progress and general discovery of how the car behaved on the limit.
