Nothing says ‘F1’s European leg’ quite like a stand-alone visit to Montreal for the Canadian Grand Prix.
The annual visit to Canada has long disrupted F1’s long European run to capitalise on the narrow window of warm summer weather in Quebec at the high-speed Circuit Gilles Villeneuve semipermanent street track.
Though the sport hasn’t always hit its climatic target.
Watch the Formula 1 Canadian Grand Prix 2023 live and ad-break free in racing on Kayo Sports on Monday, 19 June, at 4:00am AEST. New to Kayo? Start your free trial now >
The Canadian Grand Prix is perhaps best known in recent times for playing the weather card. Rain arrives randomly, heavily and often decisively, shaking up the field or suspending the race entirely.
Jenson Button’s famous last-to-first victory in four hours and four minutes of interrupted red-flag action in 2011 will live long in the memory.
With rain forecast all weekend, some are hoping there’ll be an elevated chance that someone other than Max Verstappen could stand on the top step.
Sergio Pérez certainly hopes it’ll be him — the Mexican is targeting a “reset” to his season from 53 points down on his teammate.
Ferrari and Aston Martin will also be hoping for a bounce-back from difficult weekends in Barcelona.
But the rain could be more valuable to the midfield, where points have been difficult to come by this season. McLaren, having scrapped to unlikely points all year, could be the biggest winners from a wet grand prix given its recent form in the rain.
WILL VERSTAPPEN EQUAL ONE OF F1’S ALL-TIME GREATS?
Sitting on 40 victories after his stroll to first place in Spain, Max Verstappen starts the Canadian Grand Prix with an opportunity to equal Ayrton Senna’s career tally of 41 wins this Sunday.
Senna is fifth on the winners list, but his status as one of the sport’s all-time greats makes it a meaningful milestone.
So too do the similarities between Verstappen and Senna — both aggressive, elbows-out racers whose reputations were built on their intimidating driving styles.
Coincidentally Montreal was also where Lewis Hamilton matched Senna’s 65 pole positions in 2017. The Senna family presented him one of the Brazilian’s helmets from 1987 in recognition.
Verstappen entering the top five on the winners list will also be meaningful by reinforcing the fact that we’ve entered the Verstappen era — if anyone really needed reminding.
Verstappen extends title lead in fashion | 01:54
Verstappen’s wins are coming thick and fast.
The Dutchman has doubled his victory tally, from 20 to 40, in just 15 months, and with 15 races remaining, there’s plenty of history still to be made this season.
Four-time champion Alain Prost is next on the list, with 51 victories. Twelve wins would see Verstappen into outright fourth.
Sebastian Vettel is third with 53 wins. But would 14 victories from the remaining 15 races be too improbable?
“If you look at how we are performing, yes [we can win them all],” Verstappen said, per ESPN. “But it’s very unrealistic.
“There are always things that will go wrong in a season that are sometimes out of your control. I’m not thinking that is possible.
“There was only one year (1988) where McLaren was close to this; it was one race [the team lost], and that was less races than now.”
Still, at what race are you prepared to bet against Red Bull Racing?
WILL SERGIO PÉREZ SHOW SIGNS OF LIFE?
The deposed king of streets has his championship challenge in the death zone just seven rounds into the year.
He’s 53 points behind teammate Verstappen after two painful rounds, scoring no points in Monaco and scraping to fourth in Spain.
Verstappen, meanwhile, hasn’t finished lower than second all year.
The points picture is already so overwhelming that team principal Christian Horner says the pressure’s now off the Mexican given his longshot odds of recovery.
It has Pérez looking desperately for a jump-start to his title hopes.
“I basically want to reset and go again,” he said. “I‘m looking forward to getting back to the form we had in the early season.
“I cannot afford to have any bad weekends anymore. I think I‘ve had two or three bad weekends in the season, so I really have to get rid of those and keep the consistency high, because I think it’s something that Max has been really good and consistent throughout this period.”
It was only four races ago, in Azerbaijan, that Pérez looked like a legitimate challenger, with the collapse coming since then. This weekend, on a street track, could decide whether the good form or the bad was the blip.
Pérez’s historical Montreal form isn’t spectacular bar a podium in 2012, but if he can invoke his early-season speed between the barriers, he might be able to turn this weekend into a little bit of momentum.
CAN ASTON MARTIN BOUNCE BACK FROM BARCELONA?
The status of second-best team has rotated between Mercedes, Ferrari and Aston Martin this season.
While surely none of the three now harbours any genuine hope of winning this year’s title, being as close as possible to Red Bull Racing is important in capitalising when one of those random races arrives.
As Verstappen said, things will always go wrong in a season.
Think back to 2014, when Mercedes had a similarly formidable pace advantage. Canada was the first of three blips thanks to an energy recovery system failure that cooked the brakes. Daniel Ricciardo took advantage to claim his first F1 victory.
It’s the position Aston Martin hopes its new upgrade package will put it in.
After Mercedes brought a massive set of new parts to Monaco and Ferrari did likewise in Spain, it’s now the green team’s turn to try to take a big step forward and restore its position as best of the rest.
The new parts aren’t concept-changing like they were for Mercedes and Ferrari. Instead they’re consistent with an evolution of the prevailing philosophy, with the entire package more aggressively sculpted and refined.
“We‘ve been discovering things at every race this year, and I think it’s an optimisation of the package,” said Alonso, who qualified second here last year in an Alpine.
“We‘ve been constantly bringing new parts to the races, and this is another step forward, and more to come in the future.”
The new parts will come as a welcome boost after a difficult weekend in Barcelona, where the team finished sixth and seventh at the back of the leading pack.
On paper Canada is a mixed bag for Aston Martin. Most of the corners are slow chicanes, which will suit the car, but the long straight will punish what has so far this season been a draggy aerodynamic package.
In that sense it’ll be interesting to see what the upgrade does for the car’s competitiveness.
WILL FERRARI FIND THE ANSWERS IT’S LOOKING FOR?
Aston Martin is hoping sixth and seventh will be the team’s nadir for the season. Charles Leclerc should be so lucky. In Barcelona he couldn’t even score points.
His problems started with an unspecified mechanical problem in qualifying that left him starting from pit lane, from where he was unable to recover into the top half of the field.
Two weeks on, he alarmingly admitted the team couldn’t find any issue with his car back at the factory.
“For now we don‘t have the reason,” he said. “So this is a little bit more worrying.
“We need to push and try to understand the reason for it, because obviously the feeling was really bad.”
It leaves the driver and team simply hoping the issues won’t recur.
There are some minor bright spots. Carlos Sainz started on the front row in Spain. Though he finished fifth with diabolic tyre wear, Leclerc thinks the knowledge gained from the upgrades introduced that week will be useful this weekend.
“In Spain we were quite easily off the window and then we were losing quite a lot of performance, so we‘ve learnt a lot, and I’m pretty sure we’ll be in a better place for this weekend,” he said.
“We need to just try and maximise our package, understand more this package, the way we should set up the car in order to maximise it.”
But he remains realistic about expectations.
“I don‘t think we’ll have any miracles,” he said.
“I think we expect Aston Martin to be very strong this weekend. We expect Red Bull to be very strong this weekend. We struggle to understand exactly where Mercedes will be compared to us.”
Last year Ferrari was a victory contender. The contrast this season is likely to be painful.
WILL CONDITIONS HELP McLAREN TO UNLIKELY POINTS?
McLaren is counting the days to its B-spec upgrade, due to arrive across the Austria-Britain double-header next month. For now it’s bracing for a couple of difficult weekends.
Canada could be particularly tricky.
The car has a few specific strengths, namely high-speed aerodynamic performance. It’s why, in the specific conditions of qualifying in Spain, where the corners are very high speed, Lando Norris was able to put himself third.
“You don’t usually find these corners in other tracks,” team boss Andrea Stella explained. “When it’s medium speed or low speed, we struggle a little bit.
“Ride heights are higher — you are further away from the ground — so actually the downforce you have is much less not only for the speed but because of the attitude [of the car].”
Unfortunately the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve comprises no high-speed corners. Most turns are slow and fiddly and linked by long straights.
Doubly concerning is that the surface itself, comprising public roads, yields very little grip. The other key weakness of the MCL60 is that it operates disproportionately poorly in low-grip conditions.
There may be some reason for optimism, however.
Rain is forecast all weekend, particularly Friday and Saturday.
When it rained in the late stages of the Monaco Grand Prix and the field switched to intermediate tyres, Norris and Piastri were the fastest drivers on the track thanks to the car’s ability to quickly generate tyre temperature, putting both into the points.
If wet conditions prevail this weekend, it could be the team’s key to some unlikely points at a difficult track.
HOW CAN I WATCH IT?
The Formula 1 Canadian Grand Prix is live and ad-break free in racing on Kayo and Fox Sports.
First practice starts at 3:30am (AEST) on Saturday, with second practice following at 7:00am.
Final practice is at 2:30am Sunday, with qualifying going green at 6:00am.
Pre-race coverage of the Canadian Grand Prix starts at 2:30am, with the lights out at 4:00am.