The first sprint ever held at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve delivered the thing Mercedes have avoided all season: their two drivers using the same piece of track at the same time. George Russell won it from sprint pole, his second sprint win of 2026 - but the story was the lap-six moment when Andrea Kimi Antonelli hung his car around the outside of his teammate into the first chicane, found the door firmly shut, banged wheels and bounced across the grass.
The sprint
The contact cost Antonelli second to Lando Norris , and his follow-up lunge at the Turn 8 chicane ended in a lock-up and another trip across the grass. The radio traffic wrote the headlines for him: Russell was “very naughty”, a penalty was demanded, and the reply from the pit wall was, in effect, stop moaning. The stewards agreed with the pit wall - no investigation stuck - and Antonelli went to see Toto Wolff about it as soon as he climbed out. Russell’s view: nobody gets overtaken around the outside of Turn 1, so the defence was safe. Norris spent the closing laps within DRS range and threw one last look into Turn 1 on the final lap that never quite stuck. At the flag, 1.272s and 1.843s covered the three of them.
Behind, Oscar Piastri and Charles Leclerc were split by a tenth, and Lewis Hamilton brushed the Wall of Champions defending fourth late on - he dropped to sixth in the final laps with the wall’s paint on his sidepod. Max Verstappen took seventh from seventh: quietly, at a power circuit, the Red Bull looked less lost than it has all year.
The midfield that mostly started in the pit lane
Four cars - Alexander Albon , Pierre Gasly , Oliver Bearman and Valtteri Bottas - started from the pit lane for parc fermé breaches, and all finished a lap down in a 23-lap race with no safety car to close the field. Lance Stroll joined them at the back and finished sixteenth at his home race. Isack Hadjar ’s afternoon died early: an engine problem from eighth on the grid, two pit visits, and three laps lost circulating for data. His teammate Arvid Lindblad collected the final point in eighth - the first sprint the RB rookie has actually finished, having retired in Shanghai and never started in Miami, and he did it on the hard tyre nobody else chose. Fernando Alonso was the only retirement, ending a weekend that had already included a crash at the end of SQ1. Nico Hülkenberg earned a 10-second penalty for leaving the track and gaining an advantage.
The championship
Eight more points for George Russell cut the gap to 18 - and for the first time this season, the intra-Mercedes fight looks like an actual fight, elbows included. Lando Norris has quietly outscored everyone but Antonelli since the Miami sprint - 25 points to the leader’s 31, with Russell on 20 over the same stretch.
The Canadian Grand Prix runs on Sunday, with qualifying still to come this evening - and a team debrief in Brackley that suddenly matters more than either.