The big Formula 1 championship swing offered some easy scope for our Canadian Grand Prix winners and losers picks… and so did a few teams’ reactions to the weather…
Loser: George Russell (DNF)
A worrying weekend for George Russell, not just because he’s now facing a 43-point deficit in the championship due to the power unit issue that put him out of the race while leading.
But worrying because of how much of a nuisance his 19-year-old Mercedes team-mate Kimi Antonelli was all weekend long on one of Russell’s strongest circuits.
Russell looked more composed in battle on Sunday, but Antonelli looked faster, as he had for much of the Montreal weekend.
That’s as big a headache for Russell to solve as the meaty points deficit. – Josh Suttill
Winner: Lewis Hamilton (2nd)
We’ve seen Lewis Hamilton have plenty of strong starts to weekends at Ferrari, but comparable endings have been few and far between.
Not here, at a Montreal track he’s had so much success at.
Though boosted by ditching the simulator before this event and taking a new set-up direction, his podium chances looked to have ended when Max Verstappen passed him early on.
But excellent execution in the pitstop phase helped Hamilton reduce a gap that was over five seconds down to nothing, and the pass to best Verstappen was every bit as worthy as you’d expect as he fired it around the outside on the entry to Turn 1, darting to the apex to control the exit and, in-turn, the entry to Turn 2.
A weekend where you could forget the last season and a bit of disappointment of Hamilton at Ferrari and roll back the years – he looked every bit a relevant and fierce threat in Montreal. – Jack Benyon
Loser: McLaren (11th & DNF)
On what’s otherwise been a very stellar weekend, Montreal Sunday was verging on embarrassing for McLaren with multiple errors.
Picking the right tyres in mixed conditions is never easy, but putting both its cars on intermediates on a track that clearly wasn’t wet enough for them was a clear-cut, no hindsight needed mistake.
That was compounded by some driver errors: Lando Norris’s trip across the grass and Oscar Piastri punting Alex Albon’s Williams at the hairpin.
The resulting damage and 10-second time penalty ruined any chance of Piastri recovering to a point, while Norris had mounted a solid recovery into the top 10 before retiring with a reported gearbox issue. – JS
Winner: Kimi Antonelli (1st)
The biggest thing today is the 25 points versus zero for Russell. Russell could now beat Antonelli in three straight all-Mercedes victory duels – and he would still be one point short of negating the impact of today.
But you have to take the main course of the points swing with the seasoning of the dynamic inside Mercedes. Sure, Antonelli was too hot-headed in the sprint and dropped out of the top two; sure, he lost pole; sure, he was second in the grand prix when Russell’s car conked out.
That’s not how it felt, though. That’s not the gist of it. On a weekend that was supposed to restore normality to the balance of power between Mercedes’ steady veteran and young sophomore, Antonelli consistently looked like he had Russell on the ropes.
He just looks way too good for Russell to feel at all optimistic about overturning what is now a 43-point lead. – Valentin Khorounzhiy
Loser: Charles Leclerc (4th)
Charles Leclerc said on Saturday that this had been one of his worst weekends in F1 and it didn’t feel like it got much better on Sunday, either.
Struggling with brakes, then tyres, then all around feeling, Leclerc was stuck in fifth in the race until he was jumped by Isack Hadjar during the pitstop phase, and then Hadjar almost drove Leclerc off the road – which cost him more time.
He made it through, but was then a distant fourth for the rest of the race after Russell’s retirement promoted him a position. And when he was told Ferrari team-mate Hamilton had picked up his pace at one point in the race, Leclerc scolded his engineer and told him not talk to him until the final lap in a no-nonsense, spiky message.
A really disappointing weekend and a rare one in recent years – Leclerc well overshadowed by his team-mate.
“It feels good to still maximise points on a day like this, but I will say the bigger feeling out of a race like this is the disappointment of such a poor performance,” he said. – JB
Winner: Franco Colapinto (6th)
Franco Colapinto has been in good form at Alpine in recent races, going from what was a foregone conclusion of a loss to Pierre Gasly last year to repeatedly besting his team-mate and looking good value for his F1 seat again just like he did at Williams.
There’s not a lot to report from his race which could have been an eighth if the McLarens hadn’t imploded, but you can’t control other people’s results and performances.
He and the Alpine were nowhere near the top three teams in the race, but Colapinto delivered another error-free weekend.
And his reward is the best finish of his F1 career so far. – JB
Loser: Alex Albon (DNF)
This has been a strong contender for the most brutal weekend of Albon’s F1 career so far.
It begins with Albon colliding with a groundhog that sends him into the wall in practice, which forces him to miss sprint qualifying.
He’s then having a decent grand prix despite limited track time, only to be torpedoed out of the race by Oscar Piastri at the hairpin.
Albon simply couldn’t catch a break in Montreal. – JS
Winner: Liam Lawson (7th)
Liam Lawson probably described his seventh place better than any of us could: “Considering everything this weekend, it’s been a good result.”
He’s definitely not wrong. After missing almost the entirety of Friday’s running, Lawson had to start from scratch in the sprint. Admittedly capitalising on the misfortunes of other drivers ahead of him to get into the points on Sunday, Lawson also had to deal with tyre temperature struggles and general strategy bugs to get it over the line.
It was the best he could do given Colapinto’s superior pace in the Alpine ahead, but Lawson showed he was more than up to the challenge by holding off Gasly in the closing stages to bring home a welcome seventh.
Exactly as Lawson said, a good result that rewarded Racing Bulls with some well-deserved points from an all-around tough weekend. – Eden Hannigan
Loser: Arvid Lindblad (DNS)
Lawson’s eventual result was probably all the more satisfying because he’d been overshadowed at Racing Bulls up to the point its two cars’ fortunes abruptly switched on the grand prix grid.
Rookie Arvid Lindblad had been enjoying his most convincing weekend since his standout start in Melbourne, with ninth-eighth-ninth in the competitive Montreal sessions pre-race.
But Lindblad didn’t get a chance to continue that form in the grand prix as a clutch issue meant he couldn’t take the start. – JS
Winner: Carlos Sainz (9th)
Salvaging two points from a race you started on the wrong-weather tyre is obviously an enormous win, especially for a team in Williams’s position.
Given his team-mate’s horror weekend of various calamities, Carlos Sainz was almost flying solo for Williams here – and nearly ended all hope with the start-on-intermediates call that he took credit for and admitted quickly became evident as a disaster.
Points-scoring needed attrition up ahead and an assist from Haas, which offered up a free spot through a brutally slow pitstop for Ollie Bearman. “He wouldn’t have [beaten me] – but I was stationary in the pits for a while,” Bearman lamented.
“But that goes to show that as long as you basically complete the race, you’re finishing the points today with a half-decent car.”
But there is a key word – “half-decent”, or even better than that, which Sainz genuinely felt the FW48 was in the race.
“After the first stop from inter to mediums, we had mega pace. Honestly, for moments I was matching or quicker than the McLarens around me, but we were on the same strategy.
“That allowed us to get back into points, back into contention and get our race sorted because we needed something quite special to come back from the back.” – VK
Loser: Audi (12th & 13th)
On paper, at least one Audi could, and probably should, have got a point from Sunday’s race, but it never looked on the cards after the team was lulled into the wrong call of starting on the intermediates.
Both drivers defended the decision, explaining that Audi’s documented struggles with getting heat into its tyres on cold tracks made it seem like the correct call to start on the inters, though Nico Hulkenberg also acknowledged with hindsight “it was absolutely not the right thing to do.”
Gabriel Bortoleto remained exactly where he qualified in 13th, even after three drivers starting ahead of him failed to see the finish. He put this down to feeling like “driving on ice” after experiencing the coldest race of his short F1 career to date.
Hulkenberg dropped one place to 12th from his starting position in part due to a penalty for speeding in the pitlane, although he felt “it didn’t really matter in a race like this.”
The pair did echo their faith in the strong Audi package, but it was the tyres and the wrong decision that meant both drivers left Canada without the points they’d been hoping for. – EH
Loser: Aston Martin (15th & DNF)
Aston Martin knows it isn’t going to have a particularly fast car any time soon, so until that happens it should ideally be maximising its chances of profiting off others’ misfortune by becoming more adept at finishing races.
Retiring your faster driver due to a seat problem doesn’t scream “adept at finishing races” – though Fernando Alonso claimed it was more frustrating how quickly 10th place after five laps turned into double-digit seconds out of the points before his retirement.
The less said about Lance Stroll’s weekend overall, the better. – VK
