The 2026 season comes to Île Notre-Dame on Sunday May 24 - the fifth round, the second sprint weekend in a row, and the first race in a time zone the European broadcast booth doesn’t have to apologise for. Andrea Kimi Antonelli arrives with three wins and a 26-point lead. Max Verstappen arrives seventh in the championship on 22 points, the worst start to a season he’s had since 2020.
The championship
After four rounds:
Constructors: Mercedes 160, Ferrari 89, McLaren 71, Red Bull 26.
What Canada asks of the new cars
Three demands the previous four circuits haven’t really made of the 2026 package:
- Traction out of slow corners. The Circuit Gilles Villeneuve is a stop-start layout punctuated by three hairpins and the slow chicane onto the pit straight. Cars that recover energy efficiently into the corner and deploy it cleanly on exit gain laptime that won’t show up on lower-grip circuits. With 50/50 PUs and active-aero, this is the first race that properly stress-tests the regulations’ core idea.
- Kerb tolerance. The chicanes are aggressive. Cars that ride them get the laptime; cars that don’t either lift or break.
- The Wall. The final chicane onto the pit straight has a concrete barrier on the exit that has put more world champions (Schumacher, Villeneuve, Hill, all on the same Sunday in 1999) into the wall than any other inanimate object in F1. With unfamiliar 2026 cars, an active-aero system that drops downforce on the straight, and weather that historically reaches in and changes the weekend without warning, expect a hit list.
“The Wall of Champions has put more world champions into the barrier than any other inanimate object in F1.”
The storylines
The W17 has had race-pace advantage at every weekend so far. Canada’s lower-downforce setup window is the first track that might neutralise some of it. If Mercedes win here too, the title conversation moves from when to which Mercedes.
Five years older, the racecraft is on his side, and Antonelli has yet to face a teammate fight at the front of a real championship. Russell’s Montreal record - two podiums, one win in 2024 - is one of the strongest in the current field.
A new floor and revised cooling are the rumoured Miami-spec package that Max Verstappen said didn’t really do what we wanted. Canada has another iteration of it. Red Bull cannot afford another P5-best weekend.
Two podiums in two rounds for Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris respectively. A third weekend on the podium with both cars would close the gap to Ferrari in the constructors to under 20 points.
Forecasts on Thursday show a 60% chance of rain on Sunday. Montreal in wet conditions is a genuinely different race; the safety car appears once for every two visits across the last decade.