Despite a tumultuous triple-header, Oscar Piastri ended the run of three races in Imola, Monte Carlo and Barcelona exactly where he’d started — atop the podium and atop the championship standings.

He’s the man to beat in Formula 1.

Victory in Spain was Piastri’s fifth of the season. No Australian in Formula 1 history has won more than five grands prix in one season.

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The previous two times an Australian has won five races in a calendar year they’ve also won the title — Jack Brabham in 1960 and Alan Jones in 1980.

Of course seasons were much shorter back then — 14 races for Jones and just 10 for Brabham — but it’s a nice statistic nonetheless as well as a timely reminder of Piastri’s impressive title-leading form.

“I enjoy being the hunted,” he said. “It means you’re normally doing something right if you’re in that spot, so I’m enjoying it.

“The season’s obviously gone very well so far, and Spain was a great example of that.”

There’s no obvious reason he can’t continue building on that run of form this weekend.

But Montreal is a classic for more than just its high-speed, high-risk circuit. This track has a habit of making things happen. Reality and expectations aren’t always in alignment.

“I think this weekend should be good for us,” he said. “But I think the competition will be tight.

“It’s a track that tests everything. It’s basically a street circuit. It’s very bumpy. The weather’s often at play. There’s a lot of variables that can spice things up, so we’ll some competition from a few teams around us.”

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CAN MAX VERSTAPPEN AVOID ANOTHER PENALTY?

Max Verstappen has been McLaren’s chief antagonist this season as the only other driver to take poles and win races.

But in Montreal he’ll race under a penalty cloud, having clocked up his 11th penalty point in an apparently deliberate crash with George Russell in Spain, the previous race.

A 12th penalty point would result in an automatic race ban — unprecedented for a reigning world champion.

Penalty points last 12 months, and Verstappen will get two back at the end of June, after the Austrian Grand Prix, but he won’t get any more back after that until October.

Verstappen was typically defensive about his behaviour in Barcelona but atypically appeared to make a sort of apology on social media in the days after the grand prix, acknowledging that the whack he gave Russell was “a move that was not right and shouldn’t have happened”.

“I was a bit surprised to see him taking responsibility, because it’s quite unlike him,” Russell responded in Montreal.

But if anyone was expecting further contrition this weekend, they would have been left wanting by the typically defiant Dutchman.

Would he change his approach given the looming risk of a ban?

“I don’t know,” he replied, per The Race. “Why should I?

“I will always race hard, race how I think I should race.

“I cannot just back out of everything.

“I’m just going to race like I always do. I trust myself.”

Was it fair that he was so close to a race ban in the first place?

“Life is not fair, if you look at it like that.”

Verstappen has historically bristled at the suggestion his uncompromising racing style should ever be pared back, and after four years dominating the sport his way, he’s even less moved by such arguments.

But it’s worth remembering how easy it is to pick up one penalty point.

He earnt one of his points for being 0.63 seconds too fast during a virtual safety car period, which he later explained as him being caught out by his own speed just as the VSC ended, preventing him from slowing down enough before the resumption.

Another of his single points was picked up for driving too slowly in qualifying.

That’s before we consider the risk of penalty due to his elbows-out attacking style — he has four points for causing a collision and another two for forcing another driver off the track in battle.

The risk of a ban, therefore, remains very real.

It’ll be a tense couple of races for Red Bull Racing.

Furious Max ‘deliberately’ RAMS Russell | 00:59

IS FRED VASSEUR UNDER REAL PRESSURE?

There is no more heavily scrutinised job in Formula 1 than being Ferrari team principal, but the pressure has ratcheted up markedly on Frédéric Vasseur in the week leading up to the Canadian Grand Prix.

Numerous Italian publications — most notably major newspapers La Gazzetta dello Sport and Il Corriere della Sera — published stories reporting variously that Vasseur was under pressure, that Charles Leclerc had become disillusioned with the team and was considering his future in Maranello and that Lewis Hamilton was considering an early exit.

La Gazzetta reported that Vasseur had three races — this weekend in Canada and the following double-header in Austria and Grand Britain — to turn the ship around of be sacked.

Il Corriere has even suggested Ferrari is lining up Antonello Coletta, the head of its World Endurance Championship team, as a potential replacement.

According to The Race, Ferrari issues a brief statement declaring the reports “not even worth commenting on”.

Hamilton, who himself is under pressure after a lacklustre start to his first campaign in red, was forceful in his defence of his team boss.

“Firstly, I love working with Fred,” he said. “Fred’s the main reason I’m in this team and I got the opportunity to be here, for which I’m forever grateful.

“We’re in this together. We’re working hard in the background. Things aren’t perfect, but as I said, I’m here to work with the team and with Fred.

“I want Fred here. I do believe Fred is the person to take us to the top, and so that’s that.

“To me, it’s all nonsense what people have written. Most people don’t know what’s going on in the background.

“Naturally there’s a lot of pressure because we want to win, but that’s not any part of the discussion at the moment.”

Leclerc was also dismissive of the reports, particularly those regarding his own supposedly wavering commitment.

“I’m very surprised. I have no idea from where it’s coming from,” he said, per Autosport. “I’ll rather just ignore it.

“We have a vision that we share, us three — Fred, Lewis and myself — in order to try and get back to winning, and we’ve been working to put that all together.

“This is our plan. I think we should stick to it.”

Support from his drivers will be heartening for Vasseur, particularly given the last time Ferrari denied reports it was about to axe a team principal it ended up doing exactly that, sacking Mattia Binotto weeks after declaring stories of the Italian’s demise were “without foundation”.

Whatever the case, there’s no doubt Ferrari needs a strong weekend. Leclerc was lucky to finish on the podium in Spain, and despite that putting the team second on the constructors title table, it’s been on average close to half a second off the pace this season.

At a minimum it will surely do better than it did in Montreal last year, when both cars were knocked out in Q2 and failed to finish the race, one with engine problems and the other thanks to a crash.

Another result like that would really get the Italian media fired up.

Lewis left dejected after Spanish GP | 00:51

CAN FRANCO COLAPINTO RELIEVE SOME PRESSURE?

Franco Colapinto is three rounds into what was initially billed as a five-race experiment in the seat originally signed to Jack Doohan.

His objectives were simple. In the words of de facto team principal Flavio Briatore, he had to “be fast, not crash, and score points”.

So far he’s been slower than Doohan was relative to Pierre Gasly — 0.392 second compared to 0.235 seconds — he has suffered one massive crash along with other errors, and he has scored no points.

Speaking last time out in Spain, Briatore cast serious doubt on the Argentine’s future.

“I don’t know at this moment if Franco will stay for the season or not, but let’s see,” he said. “Depends on the performance. We’re only looking at the performance, nothing else.”

Speaking in Montreal, Colapinto said the break between races — his first weekend off since being elevated to the seat — has helped him digest his difficult start.

“Getting into a triple-header is always difficult because you don’t have enough time to change things,” he said. “I was used to something so different, which didn’t give me enough time between races to reflect enough on it and learn and understand exactly what we need to do.

“I really trust that this break was really good for us. Hopefully it brings some performance back.

“Hopefully I can find a bit of that confidence I had in the car last year and find a way around it a bit more.”

Colapinto revealed he spent much of the break at the Enstone factory attempting to decode his problems.

“Just generally there are some things set-up-wise that have not been working for me,”

he explained.

“I felt very much almost out of phase with everything — with the tools in the car, with the set-up. One thing was fighting the other one.

“Once we understood that after the race in Barcelona, it made much more sense to me.

“I think here I arrive with a bit more confidence. I spent a lot of days in the sim, a lot of days in the factory with the engineers so I can understand.

“Hopefully we made a step. We need that step, so hopefully we can do it here.”

With the clock clearly ticking down, a good race could be vital to his career.

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CAN LANCE STROLL SUMMON ANY ENTHUSIASM FOR HIS HOME RACE?

The previous round in Spain passed with considerable doubt over whether Lance Stroll would be fit to participate in his home Canadian Grand Prix. The Montrealer had been withdrawn from the race in Barcelona after qualifying citing an injured wrist, for which he subsequently required surgery.

Reserve drivers were scrambled, but in the days leading up to the race the team confirmed its home hero would indeed be behind the wheel — great news for the driver and his home crowd.

Not that you’d know it from his monotonous appearance in the press conference.

How was the wrist?

“Yeah, it’s good to be here. It’s good to be home, racing in Montreal. The wrist is feeling good,” he said, chewing on a piece of gum.

How confident was he that his injury had healed?

“Pretty confident. Should be good.”

What sort of surgery did you need?

“I was in pain for a couple races. Barcelona was a lot of pain, so I got a procedure done, and now I’m not in pain.”

On and on it went.

The moderator, Tom Clarkson, gamely attempted to elicit any kind of emotion from him with an easy question about his relationship with his home circuit, one of F1’s classics. When was the first time he’d gone to Circuit Gilles Villeneuve?

“Long time ago. I was a little boy.”

It was excruciating viewing.

It was perhaps not as excruciating as his injury, which he said had been hampering him during the triple-header before he decided to withdraw — a slight contradiction with the team’s claim that it had been an issue for the previous six weeks.

If it had been slowing him down, however, it might have been evident at only one circuit: Monaco, where he as 0.889 seconds slower than teammate Fernando Alonso. It would tally too given the sinuous Monte Carlo circuit would be demanding on a driver’s wrists as they twist and turn their way through the principality.

His half-second deficit in Spain was also above his season-long average 0.394-second gap to the sister car, albeit it wasn’t his biggest margin of the year.

So maybe we’re set to see Stroll return to his early-season form, when in Australia and Canada he was just one place and on average 0.083 seconds slower than Alonso.

It would be good timing considering Aston Martin’s recent upgrades have markedly improved the car, with Alonso scoring his first points of the season last round in Barcelona.

Perhaps points at home would be enough to elicit some emotion from the 26-year-old.