Oh Canada. Oh Indy!
Start of F1 and end of Indy were a motorsport fan's dream.
The Canadian Grand Prix saw battles, broken cars and battered dreams.
It also saw Kimi Antonelli become the first driver to take his first four Grands Prix wins consecutively. More importantly though, he now leads the championship by a healthy 43 points.
I’ve been doing a lot of research into Formula One rivalries, for reasons that will become obvious soon. I don’t think Russell and Antonelli will reach Hamilton and Rosberg levels at Mercedes. Ten years on from that momentous battle, the memories are still fresh, for Toto Wolff and those at the coal face.
It feels more like what we saw at McLaren last season. Two drivers chasing their first championship. One with more experience, the other impatient to show early in his career that he belongs alongside the greats.
We saw Antonelli’s lack of experience in the sprint race. Instead of keeping his head down and focusing on the fight, he became very vocal on team radio. That was until Wolff stepped in. The headmaster spoke. The pupil listened.
What we do know about the 19-year-old Italian is that he is a very fast learner. In Sunday night’s Grand Prix, on the whole he kept his “moaning on team radio” as Toto described it, to the minimum. He concentrated on the job, going wheel-to-wheel with Russell like he’d been doing it for years. They didn’t give each other much room and both suffered lock-ups as they exchanged the lead of the race several times. It was breathtaking and brilliant.
Before the race, Wolff said: “They can race each other - consider the other driver a competitor.” But the subtext was obvious: don’t make contact.
They did on lap 25, but it was only a gentle touch of wheels while running side-by-side.
The radio message came to Antonelli, “If you can’t tidy it up, we need to stop it.”
But on lap 31, that decision was taken out of Wolff’s hands when George Russell’s silver arrow ground to a stop whilst in the lead.
Up until that point, it had been a brilliant weekend for the English driver. He had taken pole position for both the sprint and the Grand Prix, won the sprint race and was leading the race. Not only did it deprive him of valuable points but it halted a brilliant battle for all of us watching. Who knows how it would have ended.
Mercedes are fortunate to still hold such a big advantage over the rest of the field because battling as they were is only possible when the driver in third is around five seconds down the road like Max Verstappen was. He just couldn’t get close enough, even while they were taking chunks out of each other. Verstappen even laughed in the cooldown room before the podium ceremony, saying that while he was driving around in third place, he was enjoying watching them battle for the lead.
