It’s a bad day to be a groundhog.
Formula 1’s annual visit to Montreal’s Île Notre-Dame brings with it regular and much-loved sightings of members of the local groundhog community, which is thriving on the decades-old man-made island.
But sometimes the wildlife gets too close for comfort.
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Alex Albon’s Williams got too personal with one local less than halfway through the weekend’s sole practice session.
The collision with the unfortunate large rodent exiting turn 7 did considerable damage to Albon’s car even before it snapped from the Thai driver’s control and rammed the wall. Though Albon escaped unhurt, the damage to his Williams machine was so severe that he couldn’t participate in sprint qualifying.
The groundhog, though, came off worse from the contact.
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MERCEDES UPGRADES HIT THE SPOT
Albon’s stoppage was one of four that interrupted a busy first day of the sprint weekend at the Canadian Grand Prix, but neither red flags nor wildlife encounters could slow the Mercedes drivers, with George Russell locking out the front row with Andrea Kimi Antonelli.
It was a welcome boost for Russell, who started the weekend under pressure to respond to his ascendant teenage teammate at a circuit that has been kind to him in recent years.
“I never doubted myself,” he said. “I knew what I could do. Miami was a bit unique; this is an amazing circuit here — high grip, feels like you’re driving a proper Formula 1 car around here, which is how it should be. I’m glad today came together.”
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It was “good for his confidence” in the words of team boss Toto Wolff, but he had to fight for it.
Antonelli, despite a scrappy run through qualifying, came within just 0.068 seconds of depriving him of pole. The Italian is yet to qualify off the front row in any qualifying session this year and remains a clear and present danger to Russell executing the untroubled weekend he surely has in his mind.
“It was just a messy session, but still P2, and very close, so the potential is definitely there,” Antonelli said. “We’ll do better tomorrow.”
It was a good result not just for Russell but for Mercedes’s first major upgrade of the season.
The team listed eight new aerodynamic parts for its car this weekend, putting it back in sync with most of the rest of field that brought big updates to Miami.
The result was a pole position that never really seemed in doubt and by the largest margin in percentage terms since China.
“It’s definitely feeling great,” Russell said. “The team have done such a great job to bring this forward.
“We obviously saw in Miami McLaren were really close and Ferrari were not too far behind, and on a track like this it’s really excelling.
“I’m pleased to have it on the car, pleased to be back in P1 — it’s been a little while — but obviously still a big focus on tomorrow.”
It’s a blow to those who had hoped that the closeness of the competition in Miami was a turning point in the championship.
That situation is more complicated, however, than Mercedes simply reasserting itself with impunity.
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McLAREN UPGRADES MISS THE MARK
Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri were closely matched for third and fourth, separated by just 0.019 seconds, though they were than 0.3 seconds out of the battle for pole.
It was an ambivalent result for the team — almost in the mix but never really threatening.
More telling, though, is that for the first time in a very long time, McLaren is talking about an upgrade that hasn’t worked.
The reigning constructors champion came to Montreal equipped with the second phase of new parts to build on its Miami package and to keep up with Mercedes. It was optimistic it was back in the fight.
After one disrupted hour of practice, however, it took a critical piece — the front wing — off the car and elected to qualify without it. It won’t be seen back on the MCL40 for at least another round.
“We found during the session that the front wing wasn’t quite delivering what we expected, and we ultimately took the call to run the previous specification front wing, which gave the drivers more confidence and allowed them to unlock more performance,” engineering technical director Neil Houldey said.
Though the front wing is only one part, it conditions the airflow to most of the rest of the car and it therefore worth more performance that it brings itself.
But team principal Andrea Stella suggested more than just the front wing has been rejected for this weekend.
“Looking at the fact the car is pretty much the Miami car, it’s a gap that remains encouraging,” he told Sky Sports. “All things need to be put in perspective, but overall, an encouraging session.”
It’s therefore a bittersweet result.
With the caveats that this is a particular circuit and it was only sprint qualifying, the fact that the gap between McLaren and Mercedes is back to roughly where it was in Japan despite McLaren lacking half the potency of its major upgrade is a positive sign.
But it’s only positive if it can get the second half of this upgrade package working, and that question won’t be answered likely for another couple of races, until the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix in mid-June.
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FERRARI’S POWER DEFICIT REVEALED AT SEASON’S FIRST ENGINE CIRCUIT
There’s a final potentially optimistic note for McLaren in the results.
A look at the telemetry suggests that Mercedes outwitted McLaren when it comes to energy deployment. McLaren is faster through the first half of the lap, but Mercedes is much faster down the back straight — at its largest the speed different is 12 kilometres per hour — which is where all the lap time damage is done.
This is the reverse of what happened in Miami, where McLaren did a better job with the power unit in the sprint before Mercedes essentially copied its homework and pulled ahead for the grand prix.
Some of this might be built in. McLaren is running shorter gears, which are locked in ahead of time, and that knocks on to how the battery is recharged around the lap.
But McLaren wouldn’t need to find much time in engine configuration to get the gap down to striking distance.
There’s no real hope on that front for Ferrari.
Ferrari was Mercedes’s closest challenge in practice, and after the first runs of SQ3 it was Lewis Hamilton, not Antonelli, who looked most likely to pinch Russell’s pole.
Without a scruffy final chicane, he might have got himself onto the second row — but no further.
Ferrari was worried ahead of this weekend that it wouldn’t have the grunt to compete at such a power-sensitive circuit, and though it’s been more competitive than expected, that gap in engine performance is too large for it to be a genuine challenger.
The engine is being configured for maximum deployment down the back straight, but the car is still slightly down on Mercedes there — worse, though, is that having a full battery out of the hairpin is requiring some clear sacrifices down the shorter preceding straights, where it’s 10 kilometres per hour or more slower than the Merc.
The good news, though, is that the SF-26 is in a happy operating window, with Hamilton revelling in a car he can throw around a track he loves — and this after he decided not to use the Ferrari simulator in the lead-up to the weekend, preferring instead to prepare in a more traditional style.
“It’s probably the best qualifying session we’ve had for some time,” he said. “The car felt really fantastic from P1, and we made just subtle changes going into quali.
“I’m just happy to be there in the fight. I was having so much fun out there. Also the fact that I didn’t do the sim and it’s the best I’ve felt all year — I think that’s the way forward for me.
“We worked really hard sifting through the data the last couple of weeks. I found that so much more beneficial in terms of I was able to just focus on training and not be distracted, and then the second part is just really going through with a fine comb [the] ride stability, through-corner balances and mechanical balance.
“I chose a set-up that we’ve never used before, and it’s transformed the car for me, so I hope that bodes well for the rest of the weekend.”
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STEP BACK FOR VERSTAPPEN AFTER MIAMI BOOST
Red Bull Racing’s in-house engine looked like a much better match for the Mercedes, but unfortunately its car is nowhere near as good.
After the optimism injection of Miami, the team took a reality hit in Canada, where Max Verstappen was never in the mix on his way to seventh and 0.539 seconds off the pace.
It was a return to some of the fundamental set-up problems that seemed to plague the car in the earlier rounds.
Remarkably Verstappen said the ride quality of his RB22 was so bad that his legs were being bounced off the pedals over the bumpy semipermanent street circuit.
“My feeling in the car was not very good,” he said. “I was struggling a lot with the ride of the car, so over all the bumps I couldn’t put my foot down — in fact my feet were even flying off the pedals.
“It just made it very difficult to be consistent, and that’s something that we need to investigate.
“It was not great. Of course we are stuck with that for the sprint, but there are some other things to understand, and hopefully that will be a bit better then for quali.”
Red Bull Racing has a history of turning things around on Friday night, but the challenge of the sprint weekend means it doesn’t have the luxury of multiple practice sessions to trial and validate — and even the one hour that was available this weekend was heavily interrupted.
Still, the team enjoyed a reasonable turnaround between the sprint and the grand prix in Miami, so there’s some hope there.
Positive too — or is it indicative of the car’s problems? — is that Isack Hadjar has put his tough Miami weekend behind him, qualifying just 0.101 seconds behind Verstappen after having been close to a second off in Florida.
But these are small mercies when the car isn’t in a condition to fight for the podium.