Scott Gulbransen
The Canadian Grand Prix had everything: a wet-dry tire gamble that detonated McLaren’s afternoon, a Mercedes civil war for the lead, a power unit failure that crushed a championship contender and Lewis Hamilton hunting down Max Verstappen for a podium in the closing laps And at the end of it all, an 19-year-old Italian was standing on the top step at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve with his fourth straight win and a championship lead that’s starting to look like a moat.
Here’s who came out of Montreal looking like a million bucks. And here’s who left it wishing they’d stayed home.
Winner: Kimi Antonelli | Mercedes
Kimi Antonelli has now won four straight grand prix and is 43 points ahead in the Formula 1 driver’s championship standings. His 10.7-second margin of victory means the kid from Bologna isn’t sneaking up on this championship anymore. He’s running away with it.
Antonelli didn’t have the cleanest weekend. His teammate George Russell took pole and beat him in the weekend’s sprint race. And for the opening 29 laps, Antonelli was the one chasing, locking up, occasionally bouncing off escape roads as his teammate threw elbows at the front. There was at least one moment where Antonelli had to give a position back. There was contact. There was an Italian voice on team radio that didn’t sound thrilled about it.
Then the Mercedes on the other side of the garage broke, and everything Antonelli had spent the race trying to take for himself simply landed in his lap.
That’s how titles get won. You stay close, you keep the pressure on, and when reliability decides to pick a side, you’re the one in position to collect.
Forty-three points after five rounds is always impressive, but more so when it’s your first four wins and you’re barely out of high school. Antonelli still has 19 races to manage, and Russell isn’t going anywhere. But the narrative around this season has officially shifted. The question isn’t whether Antonelli can win the championship. It’s whether anyone can stop him.
Loser: George Russell | Mercedes
This one stings. This one stings badly for George Russell.
Russell came to Montreal off a bruising weekend in Miami and proceeded to do everything right. Sprint pole. Sprint win. Grand Prix pole by 0.068 seconds over Antonelli. He drove an aggressive, brilliantly judged opening stint, swapping the lead back and forth with his teammate, defending hard, attacking harder. He had the track position. He had 38 laps to bank a result that mattered.
Then his Mercedes broke. The power unit gave up on Lap 30. And what followed inside that cockpit was raw.
Russell hurled his headrest across the track. He hammered his fists into the nose of the car. Reliability had picked a side, and it wasn’t his.
“Disbelief,” said Russell, when asked how it felt after the failure of his power unit. “It feels like somebody doesn’t want me to fight or compete for this championship. Three out of the last five races there’s just been something really going against us. I’m just a bit lost for words right now.”
Sky Sports F1’s Martin Brundle put it bluntly during the broadcast, calling it “very painful for his championship chances.”
That’s the part that’s going to keep Russell up at night. He left Montreal 43 points behind his teammate in a season where Mercedes is the class of the field. He’s now behind a teenager he should be measuring himself against, not chasing. And the worst part isn’t that he was beaten on track. The worst part is he was beating Antonelli on track when his own car decided he wouldn’t be.
Russell did find some grace afterward, crediting his own performance and the doubters who’d written him off after Miami. He should. He drove like a No. 1 all weekend. He just didn’t get to finish the job.
Winner: Lewis Hamilton | Ferrari
Lewis Hamilton, the seven-time World Champion, finally looked like himself in red.
Hamilton qualified fifth, dropped into a battle with Verstappen early, complained on team radio about a lack of power, lost touch with the Mercedes fight and then quietly went to work. By the closing stages of the race, he was reeled in on the back of Verstappen’s Red Bull, hovering close, waiting for the moment.
That moment came on Lap 62. Hamilton went late on the brakes around the outside into Turn 1, sailed past Verstappen and held P2 to the flag.
For a driver who’s spent half of his Ferrari tenure absorbing questions about whether the switch was a mistake, this was the answer in real time. A second-place finish, a clean pass on Verstappen, and a podium that puts Ferrari second in the constructors’ race behind only the Mercedes that lapped everybody.
Hamilton has said all season that he’s starting to “feel like myself” at Ferrari, and Canada was the loudest version of that statement yet. The pace was there when it mattered. The aggression was there when the window opened. And the result was a podium nobody had circled before Sunday morning.
He’s still way behind in the championship. He’s still adjusting to a new garage in his second year there. But Montreal mattered. This is the version of Hamilton Ferrari signed. Tonight, the Tifosi are feeling good.
Winner: Max Verstappen | Red Bull
A third-place finish doesn’t normally land Max Verstappen in the winners’ column. This year it does.
The four-time World Champion came into Canada without a podium in 2026. Read that sentence again. Through the opening four rounds of the season, Max Verstappen, the guy who’s spent half a decade making podiums look mandatory, hadn’t finished in the top three once. The Red Bull RB22 hasn’t been kind to him under the new regs and the talent exodus around him hasn’t helped.
Then he qualified well and he ran an incredibly clean race. He held off Hamilton for long enough to matter before the Ferrari got him in the closing laps. And he walked out of Montreal with his first podium of the year and a confidence boost his team desperately needed.
This isn’t a Verstappen-is-back moment. The car still isn’t quick enough to fight the Mercedes and the gap to Antonelli at the front was substantial. But for the first time this season, Verstappen looked like a driver pulling more out of his package than the package deserves. That’s the Max we used to see every Sunday.
P3 in Montreal won’t fix Red Bull. It might just remind everybody that the guy in the cockpit hasn’t forgotten how to do this.
Loser: McLaren
It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly McLaren cooked themselves on Sunday. It was almost shocking to watch in real time.
The papaya cars came to Canada as one of the teams expected to fight Mercedes for the win. They left with a P11 finish for Oscar Piastri, a DNF for Lando Norris, a 10-second penalty for Piastri after he took out Alex Albon at the hairpin, and zero points. A complete and utter disaster for McLaren.
The blunder started before the lights went out. With rain falling pre-race, McLaren decided to start both cars on intermediate tires while almost the entire field went with slicks. The gamble worked for exactly one lap. Norris launched into the lead off the line and then both McLarens had to dive into the pits as the inters cooked themselves. Piastri came in at the end of Lap 1 for mediums. Norris followed a lap later.
Both drivers spent the rest of the afternoon trying to recover from a strategic decision that never had a chance. Piastri’s day got worse when he tangled with Albon at the hairpin, leaving debris on the track, ending Albon’s race, and earning himself the 10-second penalty. Norris went off through the grass at Turn 3, picked up grass in his sidepods, overheated the car, eventually retired with what was reported as a gearbox issue.
This is a team that’s supposed to be threatening Mercedes for the constructors’ championship. Instead they handed the field a zero-score Sunday at a track where they could have been on the podium. The intermediate gamble didn’t just cost them this race. It scrambled both drivers’ positions in the championship and gave Mercedes a free weekend to extend control of the season.
McLaren has the pace. They had it again in qualifying. They just made a call at the worst possible moment and the bill came due in front of a global audience.
Next up: Monaco. Russell needs a circuit breaker. Antonelli needs to keep doing what he’s doing. McLaren needs to find a sporting director and ask some uncomfortable questions. And Hamilton, for the first time in a long time, has a reason to think the rest of this year might actually be fun.
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