Lando Norris’ late collision with team-mate and 2025 Formula 1 title rival Oscar Piastri right under the feet of the McLaren pitwall guys rather stole the attention from a superlative George Russell victory in the Canadian Grand Prix.
Clean and dominant all weekend in a Mercedes which he accurately expected to go well around Montreal’s short corner-punctuated straights, he’s just too good, too polished and too fast now not to maximise such rare opportunities. Stunning pole to controlled race, always keeping a wary eye on Max Verstappen’s Red Bull but with the pace and tyre usage advantage to just control things according to how Max and Red Bull ran their race.
The Red Bull was harder on the tyres, more prone to front-left graining, hence the team pitted aggressively early on what was always set to be a two-stop.
Mercedes brought Russell in the lap after just to neutralise that threat. But actually, such was Russell’s smooth control of the tyre/pace combination, Mercedes still believes it could have won it with a one-stop.
The lower half of the field did indeed one-stop. But it required a gentler pace than Verstappen had initially forced at the front. That triggered everyone else among the top teams to do it that way too. Even Norris and Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, both of whom started on the hard tyre from their compromised grid positions.
Reflecting upon his race prospects after setting pole, Russell talked about how it would probably depend upon the weather. Too hot, he believed, might take the Mercedes past that sweet spot.
Actually, it didn’t seem to matter. Race day was hot, with a track temperature of almost 50-degrees C at the start. Yet still the W15 was the fastest thing in the place – and better on the tyres. Not just because Russell was running in clean air. Kimi Antonelli finished a strong third in the sister car, staying ahead – albeit just – of the McLarens once he’d put a committed pass on Piastri on the first lap. He was only a few seconds behind Verstappen and had twice almost passed him.
Scratching beneath the surface of the anomalous form tells us a little more about what it might be in the Mercedes’ DNA which makes it so good here.
Most circuits impose thermal degradation upon the tyres, either of the core or the surface. Montreal does not. Overheating rubber is just not a problem for anyone here. The super-smooth surface, the short slow corners and the tyre-cooling straights between them, make it a non-issue. There is not enough energy being fed into them for that. Which removes entirely one of the Mercedes’ main limitations. Instead, the tyre challenge is graining – of both left-hand tyres but mainly the front.
The Mercedes brakes well, gets its power down well and with the small speed spread of this track can be balanced quite nicely. The generic balance limitation of this generation, but especially marked in the Mercedes – that difficulty of getting a sweet spot between low-speed understeer and high-speed instability – doesn’t really figure here. There is no real high speed. So there goes the car’s other key limitation.
Besides all that, and Russell’s ability to wring the neck of the car in qualifying, the team felt confident enough in its inherent speed here to base its qualifying around the more robust medium C5 tyre. The soft C6 was potentially faster but far fussier and higher maintenance.
Red Bull made the same choice as Mercedes and that C5 played its part in Russell and Verstappen taking up the front row. McLaren, with no long corners, no heat deg to control, was merely competitive here. With a C5, maybe it could have challenged for pole and from there the win. But the team felt it needed the extra qualifying lap time the C6 promised – but which it couldn’t quite access. Ferrari made the same choice, with similar outcomes. That defined their challenge to Mercedes and Red Bull/Verstappen as limited.
Within each of those misguided calls, there was driver drama, with Charles Leclerc throwing the car off on Friday morning and writing off a chassis, making a great recovery into Saturday with his customary all-out attack but then suffering for that in Q3, with a wayward moment at the critical time. Which left Ferrari’s best hope starting eighth, three places behind team-mate Lewis Hamilton who was no closer to the pace than in previous races despite Leclerc insisting it was a potential pole car here. “I’m not sure it was a pole car,” pondered Frederic Vasseur, “but it could have been fighting for it if we had executed everything properly.”
Norris found himself in a similar situation, trying too hard to make up an even smaller deficit than that of the Ferrari. Those Q3 errors put him seventh. So that defined him and Leclerc starting on the hards and hoping to one-stop their way to the front. The pace was too hot for that and they were each switched to two-stops. Leclerc was further penalised by Ferrari giving him another set of hards at the first stop.
By contrast, Norris took a set of mediums and with those was able to bring himself into contention while Leclerc dropped away. Up until then, the Ferrari’s pace had been comparable to Norris’.
Lando’s strategy, unpressured by having to stop early, gave him better second stint pace than Piastri, bringing them together for their fateful collision. Norris’ stretching extended from qualifying into that badly misjudged manoeuvre, for which he took full responsibility. The move into the hairpin which took Piastri by surprise was beautifully judged. The one a few seconds later on the pit straight less so and leaves him 22 points behind in the championship.
Piastri was lucky to take no damage and he retained his fourth place to the safety car finish, ahead of Leclerc. “This weekend wasn’t strong enough from myself,” he summarised, “and as a team we also recognise it was a challenging one and we need to be stronger than this.”
Hamilton - running an initial fifth - took damage on the 13th lap from a marmot, the floor damage losing him around 0.5s per lap. There were further delays in traffic resulting from the early stop to hards, (which was to defend from a potential Fernando Alonso undercut attempt). Which left him in an unhappy no-man’s land (not for the first time this season) and demoted by the later stopping Norris and Leclerc to sixth place.
In victory, Russell was thinking back to the one that got away here.
“I felt last year was a victory lost. And then obviously we got the victory today probably due to the incredible pole yesterday.”
It was made all-the-sweeter for the team by Antonelli’s first podium.
Verstappen over-achieved just in splitting the Mercedes.
“Two times Kimi was about to overtake me,” he pointed out, “and we boxed. So that worked out quite well for me. The last pitstop I was a bit worried if I was going to make it to the end competitively because on the hard tyre in the second stint, I was already struggling as well. So I think just a lighter fuel load helped a bit.”
Expect normal service to be resumed soon.
