Another race, another piece of history for runaway championship leader Andrea Kimi Antonelli.
His victory at the Canadian Grand Prix is his fourth in succession. It’s the first time in Formula 1 history that a driver has claimed their first four victories consecutively.
This follows him matching Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher in claiming his first three pole positions in a row — and then becoming the first driver ever to convert those poles to wins — in Miami.
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We’re well past the point of thinking this might be a fluke, beginner’s — or sophomore’s — luck or friendly circumstance.
Antonelli’s growing list of records are being earned on the track.
The Italian teenager took the net lead from teammate George Russell off the line, and though they traded positions multiple times, there was never a sense that Antonelli had been beaten — just as had been the case in the sprint, he seemed to be quicker than Russell, lacking only the finish that comes with experience to make that advantage decisive.
Instead it was a technical problem that sealed the deal for Antonelli, with Russell retiring with a sudden battery-related power unit failure while leading.
Though that means it’s impossible to be certain that Antonelli would have won, the statement he made this weekend means the question is almost redundant.
At one of Russell’s most successful circuits — had he finished first or second, it would have been his best track by points, podium finishes and possibly victories and laps led — Antonelli had his measure.
What could he do with a bit more polish and poise?
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“Looked like idiots” Piastri on messy GP | 01:34
NO SILVER PAPAYA RULES AT MERCEDES
Thankfully for those who were counting on rain to spice up the Canadian Grand Prix, Mercedes allowed the second chapter of its drivers’ unfolding rivalry to go ahead without restriction.
We got the taster in the sprint, with Russell all but pushing Antonelli onto the grass at the first turn. The defence was a legal, as was Antonelli’s around-the-outside attempt, but both drivers strayed into the grey area of expected behaviour for battling teammates.
They continued in that slightly antagonistic spirit in the grand prix.
“It was a tough fight,” Antonelli said. “I think a couple of times was maybe a little bit on the edge, but we were going at each other. We were both pushing and we both wanted to win.”
To Sky Sports he highlighted one moment in particular, when he was forced to yield from the outside line at the final chicane despite being ahead at the apex.
“It was a bit borderline,” he said. “I was ahead going into the corner, but I had to open up, otherwise we would’ve collided. For sure it was a little bit on the edge, but it is what it is.”
The drivers were told to behave themselves, but the pit wall resisted intervening.
It was a refreshing change for those who remember with mixed emotions some of the battles between Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris last season, when the heavy hand of the so-called papaya rules was never far away, warning and admonishing and judging over the radio and occasionally out of the car too.
It’s early days, and Mercedes may yet find a need to more strictly regulate its drivers, but team boss Toto Wolff said he was happy to trust his drivers so long as they didn’t jeopardise their one-two finish.
“Every time when we thought about saying, ‘We’ve had enough for the moment’ because we were losing time to Verstappen behind us, the next two laps were fast again,” he said
“As long as we maintained that gap, it was okay watching it.
“It’s a luxury problem. I would hope we go like this for much longer in the season, but you can’t discount the others.
“If it was closer behind us, if we were threatened to lose position, then we would definitely jump in and say, ‘Let’s not lose so much time with each other’.”
Though Antonelli didn’t claim victory by prevailing in the duel, it allowed him to demonstrate that the win wasn’t simply circumstantial but thoroughly deserved.
Russell RAGES! Brutal blow ends his race | 01:08
RUSSELL’S NUMBERS GAME
Russell was understandably angry when he parked his car at the exit of the turn 8-9 chicane.
It was the lost victory. It was the lost points. It was the massive deficit to his teammate, who was able to cruise to victory in his stead.
When the anger subsided, there was just despondency.
“It’s his to lose,” Russell said, per The Race, reflecting on the new 43-point margin to his title-leading teammate.
“It’s so many points ahead. It feels like the gods don’t want me to be in this fight — when I look at the safety car timing in Japan, breaking down in China Q3 [while] fighting for pole, breaking down from the lead here today.
“But pressure’s off. Go out, enjoy every single race, try and win every single race — and I’ve got nothing to lose, so I don’t want to be stood here talking like that.
“It is of course frustrating, and I want to be in that fight. Hopefully the luck turns.”
There are two ways of looking at this, and both would have been in play in those pessimistic post-race remarks.
The first is the hard truth: that Antonelli’s lead is massive.
At 43 points, Antonelli could finish second to Russell for the next six grands prix — sprints aside — in succession without losing the title lead, taking him all the way to the mid-season break without losing top spot.
If you were to assume — though it is a big and almost meaningless assumption — that Mercedes can finish first and second at every grand prix, Russell would have to end the season with at least 13 wins to clinch the championship.
Only three drivers have won 13 or more times in a season: Max Verstappen (twice), Michael Schumcaher and Sebastian Vettel.
But that discounts that this is just round 5 and that there are still 17 grands prix remaining.
It discounts that Oscar Piastri lost a 34-point lead with only nine races to run last season.
It also discounts a more direct historical parallel: that Lewis Hamilton trailed Nico Rosberg by exactly 43 points after five rounds in 2016 but was back in the lead just six weekends later and took the fight to the final round.
Russell is doing what any driver lacking momentum and up against a far greener, far less experienced opponent is doing.
He’s trying to redirect his pressure onto Antonelli’s shoulders hoping that the teenager will buckle.
And he’s saying that, actually, he should be leading the title but for circumstance.
Russell is too clever to think he can’t win the championship without luck — and too wily to think there’s nothing he can do to arrest his teammate’s momentum.
“These inters were a mistake” – Piastri | 00:29
McLAREN’S CANADA CATASTROPHE
Starting a dry race on wet tyres — how did it go so wrong for McLaren?
Rain had soaked Circuit Gilles Villeneuve from early Monday morning but had eased almost completely before the race, so much so that even in frigid 13°C ambient conditions, much of the track — though not all of it — was dry.
Drivers sampled a mix of intermediates and slicks on their reconnaissance laps. Piastri used a set of softs at first but found them “not easy” for grip; Lando Norris, also on slicks, slid off the road at the hairpin.
As the clock counted down to decision-making time — five minutes before the formation lap — light rain was still falling.
“Between the anthem and getting in the car, it was pretty wet on the ground,” Piastri told Sky Sports. “There was definitely no standing water, but you could clearly tell where it was wet and where it was dry.”
But it stopped once he was buckled into the car, and the two additional formation laps ensured the race started fully dry.
“Just one of those things where had it rained a little bit more, we would’ve looked like heroes, but it didn’t, so we looked like idiots,” he said.
McLaren felt it had been a lineball call as the track dried in those final crucial minutes of decision-making time, but Norris was convinced — based on his reconnaissance lap — that slicks would be unusable.
“We made the decision as a team,” he said. “I also pushed for it — I take the responsibility for that one.”
What’s remarkable, though, is that McLaren was debating it at all. Mercedes had no doubt
“Not close at all,” Wolff told Sky Sports. “When the tyre decision was taken, it was the worst of the rain that we had seen, and then it was clearing up behind.”
Only five other drivers started on intermediates, and all of them were wrong.
Once it was clear a mistake had been made, however, McLaren had to try to make the most of it, and television viewers were treated to some excruciating team radio as the drivers expressed the painful realisation they were cooked.
Piastri requested to pit off his “mistake” intermediates before the race started, but the team was right to leave him out on them for at least a lap or two. Had there been some sort of incident requiring a safety car, his losses could have been stemmed.
Norris used a lap in the lead to his advantage to rejoin 14th, but Piastri, in fifth for the first lap, had no such luck, rejoining last.
His race went from bad to worse with a clumsily misjudged move on Oliver Bearman that resulted in him T-boning Alex Albon at the hairpin.
“It was just so difficult out there,” he explained. ‘I felt like I was going into the corner pretty carefully, and I locked the front and that was it.”
He was far from the only driver to go long on cold tyres at the hairpin, but the carnage earned him a penalty.
It was his first non-points grand prix finish since the 2024 Miami Grand Prix.
Norris’s day went from worse to dire, with a precautionary stop to clear his radiators followed by a catastrophic gearbox failure that put him out of the race.
Having left Miami as the topscoring team, McLaren left Canada with 12 points, its margin to Mercedes blown out to 113 points, and some serious debriefing to do.
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IS THIS HAMILTON’S TURNING POINT?
Second-place finishes are historically irrelevant for Lewis Hamiton, but in Canada it meant a lot, representing his best grand prix result as a Ferrari driver — and his highest finish since the 2024 Las Vegas Grand Prix.
But the Hamilton we saw this weekend felt like it was from even longer ago than that.
He had teammate Charles Leclerc’s measure on pace all weekend, and in the race he was a constant forward threat, eventually catching and passing Verstappen after a memorable late-race battle to take second place on the rostrum.
How did he do it? According to him, it’s because he’s given up on using the simulator to prepare for races, instead preferring an old-school data dive to choose his set-up options.
“[Will] I use it to prepare for another race? Probably not,” he said afterwards. “There are just too many risks.
“If you look at the two best races I’ve had, I didn’t use a simulator, and that’s honestly how it was pretty much all the championships before, except for probably 2008 — I didn’t use the sim.
“It’s not a necessity. It’s a tool that can be powerful. But for me, I’m old school. I’m probably better without it.”
Speaking to Sky Sports, though, he hinted at some potentially more powerful changes to his general 2026 form improvement.
“There were so many elements that have to come together to get the car in the right place, and I think I finally have that with the engineers that I’ve got and the whole set-up within the team,” he explained. “I really hope that I can continue on with this performance.
“I’m much happier and more comfortable in the car.”
Part of last year’s story was the friction between his then race engineer, Riccardo Adami, and by the end of the year he was talking about more wholesale changes to the engineering set-up on his side of the garage.
He appeared to get a lot of what he wanted during the off-season. Now things are starting to click.
We’ve been fooled by false dawns with Hamilton at Ferrari before. This, though, looks more convincing than any of them.
Time will prove if it can be sustained.