“Point litigieux numéro deux.”
Hello everyone, and welcome to the first of two editions of Dre’s Race Review for the Le Mans weekend. While there sadly won’t be a review for the World’s Greatest Race this time, I can bring you some words on F1’s Canadian Grand Prix and later on, IndyCar’s race at Gateway. More on Le Mans in the Lightning Round. Until then, let’s get into some Papaya Rules.
Tactical Stalemate
Oh, Canada. That’s the thing about this race – It always throws up interesting scenarios. It’s like MotoGP when it gets to Philip Island, a high speed track with a bit everything that tends to equalise the field. And that’s what this race was. Max Verstappen tries a medium tyre C5 run to take pole, only for a C6 running George to steal it at the death.
Now if I was an F1 broadcaster, this is where I’d spend half an hour talking about Max Verstappen being on 11 penalty points, and lining up alongside George Russell. Sky Sports dedicated an entire segment to F1’s Mavericks, like Hunt, Senna and Schumacher. Brundle said Verstappen should have gotten 4 penalty points despite the stewards being unable to prove that Verstappen had the intention that so many think was there, and the fact that 4 points had never been handed out before under the FIA Penalty Point system.
I get it. You have to sell to the channel hoppers, the “they heard it on the grapevine” sports fan who might be curious, and “what if” can do some very heavy lifting when it comes to marketing… but this was pushed so hard, I was actually hoping for a proper clean fight as a direct result, thinking that there were multiple TV producers in a control room salivating over the idea of a Verstappen race ban while sharpening their knives. I know the latter has his moments, but he’s not Dick Dasturdly, even if the colours of his race suit match.
The race itself I thought was genuinely interesting. Mercedes have typically had strong race pace at times, but have struggled most when the track environment is too hot for them to keep their tyres in the window. And with Montreal’s track hitting 50 degrees, I thought Verstappen was going to bide his time and attack later once Mercedes hit tyre wear problems (A 2-stopper being on the cards with the C4-6 range brought again).
That just didn’t happen. In fact, Verstappen spent just as much time defending against Kimi Antonelli as he was trying to make inroads into Russell, with a gap that swung anywhere from six tenths to six seconds. As a result, it brought McLaren into contention, but for the first time arguably all season… they looked genuinely second best. Lando Norris was starting on the Hard, the true race tire of the day, while Oscar Piastri was stuck in DRS hell and just didn’t have enough extra pace to pass Antonelli’s delta. It may just be a one-off, but it’s the most vulnerable that McLaren’s looked all season, and that should be enough to at least raise an eyebrow. We had three teams in play for the win, separated by just a handful of seconds. At worst, it’s interesting.
I’ll talk about the climax in just a moment, but wanted to praise Mercedes and George Russell in particular. I’ve said for some time now that Mercedes don’t have a car that can contend with McLaren and Max’s Red Bull, but Russell has been pretty exceptional all season long at maximising the opportunities presented to him. Besides Monaco, where his car dying derailed his weekend, and overheating tyres in Imola, he’s finished in the Top 5 in eight out of the ten races so far this season, with a 50% podium rate and now, his first win of 2025. No-one on the grid deserved one more for how well he’s driven, in this writer’s opinion.
Props too to Kimi Antonelli for becoming F1’s third youngest-ever podium sitter behind Max Verstappen and Lance Stroll1. His pace was the strongest it’s been since his debut, and he held his nerve brilliantly to not give Piastri a true opening to beat him. Was unlucky not to get ahead of Max on his second stop, it could have been a Mercedes 1-2. It’s still their first double podium since Vegas last year, mind you.
The Same But Different
Contact between the McLaren’s. They touch down the main straight, as the team’s spiritual leader tried jamming his car into a gap that just didn’t exist. And with it, it gives onus to the other driver, pushing for a Championship.
I wasn’t talking about the end of this race. I was talking about the 2011 Canadian Grand Prix, when Lewis Hamilton went into the side of Jenson Button. But you can certainly see the parallels.
Lando had a much more favourable tyre delta at the end of the race compared to Piastri, who had spent the majority of his race in dirty air. And for the first time as teammates, we got a proper barney between the two McLaren drivers. And it looked like with five laps to go, Norris was winning the battle. He’d sent it at the hairpin and came out the loser of a side-by-side run to the final chicane, but Piastri was using DRS off the back of Antonelli’s car to just stay in front… until Norris tried shooting a gap that wasn’t there. Wall hit, front wing gong, day done, race over.
In a sense, Norris is lucky. Given Piastri’s been shithot in 2025 with five wins on the season (and eight straight podium finishes until today), Norris crashed on Piastri’s worst weekend since Australia and only lost 12 points. He saw the Golden Monkey at the end of the Temple in Jungle Run but forgot he still had to get out in one piece2. Lando was the first to admit it was a stupid move and 100% his fault, but it won’t make the sting any less painful as he now sits 22 points behind Piastri in the standings.
And yet, despite all that… I genuinely feel bad for Lando at this point. It honestly feels like at times, he can do nothing right, on or off the track.
You see the other elite drivers in F1, their legacies and narratives seem pretty secure. Russell’s beaten Hamilton twice and earned his keep amongst the best. Hamilton’s the GOAT. Verstappen, while reckless and guilty of the red mist, is the universally decided best driver in the world and has been for several years now. While Charles Leclerc makes the odd mistake here and there, he’s arguably the fastest guy in the world… What do we hang on Lando Norris’ head besides the general idea he’s a bottler?
For every compliment and praise he got when he had his breakthrough 2024 season, there was another quick to remind the world that McLaren had the best car for most of the year and that Norris should have been a contender, even when Verstappen drove out of his skin to win that fourth title. The season needed a fall guy, and he was the easy target. For every cool bit of praise he gets for Quadrant, F1’s equivalent of the Sidemen, the merchandise lines and the latest Portuguese girlfriend he gets, there’s another calling it all a distraction from the driving, which in the eyes of many is all that matters.
Indirectly, the man across the garage doesn’t help matters either. Oscar Piastri fits every stereotype we know and appreciate about elite drivers. Breakneck speed, well measured race craft, a quiet but sharp thinker, introverted on the outside, but with that ruthless “killer instinct” we love to describe drivers as because he sent it on Lando at Monza last year. And in a world where we like to give ourselves bonus Internet points for being first on the wagon, we’re seeing people double down on their early Piastri adopters’ kick. And when Norris is the traditional yardstick, it only deepens the narratives and perceptions of the Brit as a driver, fairly or not.
Lando Norris is not that guy. He’s been the most open racing driver I’ve ever seen in terms of discussing his mental health. No one is more critical of his own shortcomings as a driver than Lando himself. When you consider that Formula 1’s was a farm whose crop was macho-chauvanism and ego, Lando’s self-depreciating nature is so often deemed as a “weakness” within that toxic environment, when you could make the argument it’s that nature that’s made him the driver he is now. Six Grand Prix wins, 10 pole positions and 19 podiums in the last 13 months, and it still isn’t enough. Is a World Championship now the only way Lando overcomes the worst of his perceptions on the outside?
I sincerely hope that Lando is getting the support he may or may not need behind the scenes. I don’t want Lando to feel like he has to be something he so blatantly isn’t in order to win. I think you can be a kind, tolerant, self-critical person and still be an F1 World Champion. And I’ve seen more than enough from Lando in the last three years to think he can genuinely climb that mountain. I don’t have an emotional dog in the 2025 title fight, but I’d be lying to you if a part of me wasn’t hoping that Lando can shatter the mold we’ve pigeonholed for World Champions for decades already.
The Lightning Round
George Russell still needs to retire the T-Pose though. It’s not funny when you’re in on the joke.
2026 F1 Calendar is in, and well… it’s about as fine as you can hope from a 24-race season. Imola out as expected, Madring in. Woo. But throw in a Canadian GP that directly clashes with the Indy 500, and a Vegas-Qatar-Abu Dhabi triple header (The 4th-6th races in a 7 week block), and chuck in three pre-season tests… welcome to the most brutal F1 season ever put together. Help.
It’s hard not to call Derek Warwick anything other than foolish to be suspended by the FIA for making comments about Max Verstappen after the Spanish GP a fortnight ago. He’s done exactly what led to Johnny Herbert being removed from his position at the end of 2024’s season, taking money from bookmakers via a PR company for his opinions. Bookies will do this because a better informed punter is one more likely to gamble with you, and if there’s one thing Bookies have, it’s marketing cash. They have it in spades because customer acquisition is EVERYTHING in that industry.
Herbert was yanked because of the obvious conflict of interest. You can’t be an active sports official while taking money for your opinions. (Especially from bookies in today’s sports climate), it opens up accusations of bias and it’s a potential abuse of power. Given Warwick made racist comments in regards to Max Verstappen, calling him “The Great White Hope3” in 2021, I’m starting to think he’s a cat with nine lives to still have his position, and be back in Austria in a fortnight’s time like nothing happened. Very, very lucky boy. I suspect the FIA isn’t really in the position to be throwing out yet more race officials…
Editor’s Note: Red Bull lodged a protest against the result after the race – Claiming George Russell drove erratically behind the Safety Car, and may have left more than 10 car lengths behind it at the end of the race. They were both quickly dismissed. And while some have been critical of the stewards taking five and a hours to declare a result final, which is never ideal… I’m actually going to have some empathy with the FIA on this one. For the reasons listed above, they were down a steward in the building, and Enrique Bernoldi was working remotely to cover for Warwick’s suspension. That inevitably makes communication and information sharing more difficult. On top of that, we had a fleet of incidents to cover post-race4, and Red Bull lodged their review at 10:30pm UK time, about two hours after the race was over. This was abnormal circumstances, and I think it’s only fair we acknowledge that when reviewing the situation.
PS: Alright I’ll give you one pound of flesh for compensation: Norris got a 5-second time penalty for his Piastri collision. So we’re now punishing teammate clashes? Fine with that, but reducing the penalty with “no sporting consequence” as a reason for mitigation is something I don’t like. You punish based on the action, not the outcome. You don’t know what’s going to happen the moment you cross that line and I don’t think it’s ideal that the level of punishment is reflected upon that. Especially when Lance Stroll ran Pierre Gasly off the road and got 10 seconds in the same race. Can I go one weekend without mentioning Motorsport stewarding?!
Speaking of the FIA, remember those potential leadership changes that Ben Sulayem was pushing for? They passed the general assembly vote. Despite the accusations of the FIA’s democracy eroding under his presidency, you need to remember how he got in in the first place – party favours with a lot of the regional Motorsport clubs that pushed for him. MBS just became odds-on favourite for a second term.
I should have talked about this in my Spanish DRR but got distracted by… other news, but someone needs to have a word with Lewis Hamilton. He became the latest celebrity to take a cheque from Perplexity AI as a brand activation, and it had to have been a lot of cash to end up on the top of his helmet.
But as someone who has made a second career out of embracing creativity, especially black creativity, it’s a bit embarrassing to take cheques from an AI search engine that damages the environment (Another cause he’s pushed for in the past), and compromising the creativity of the same community he’s done so much to enrich. And that’s not even scratching the surface of sibling ChatGPT now being used by half a BILLION people and the damage that’s causing in education, misinformation, mental health and more. This doesn’t wipe out the immense amount of good he’s done for the sport and beyond it, but he really ought to know better. Bad luck on his car being ruined by running over a Groundhog on Lap 12. Rough.
Nico Hulkenberg has 18 points in his last two Grand Prix. Sauber as a team, had 4 for the whole of the 2024 season. The man is on fire right now.
I’m trying to love the F1 Academy, really I am. But don’t go back to Canada until you’ve actually got a raceable car, where slipstream and more power is viable. The driving standards were really, really poor across the three races that weekend and while I think the car is a big part of the problem, I feel like the roster needs a talking to, because a 17-lap race finishing with only four laps under green and timed out a lap early, is a bad look for everyone involved.
Note: Kimi Antonelli is already absuredly popular. Driver of the Day5, and an absurd amount of people sharing graphics of his first podium on Instagram. I can see why, he’s a very humble, always smiling, nice young man with a bit of relatability (as much as you can ask of an 18-year-old F1 driver), by having to fly back to Bologna tomorrow to finish Italy’s version of the A-Levels. He’s going to be a star one day.
Alex Albon’s engine cover exploded in qualifying, and it barely makes the Top 10 of weird shit to come out of Canada this weekend.
The Verdict: 6/10 (Decent) – This was going to be a 5/10 race, with some mild strategy intrigue and some decent midfield scrapping, but a bonus point had to be given due to the ending. We had four drivers from three different teams scrapping for the win, and the McLaren fight tipped it over the edge. Say what you will about Canada, it definitely wasn’t boring. It rarely is from one of the best Grand Prix of the year. See you in Austria.
- How many of you forgot about Baku 2017? It was Lance’s eighth ever start. ↩︎
- Yes, I did make a Jungle Run reference for a bet, why did you ask? Michael Underwood just won me dinner. ↩︎
- For those unaware, it was the phrase used to describe the person who could defeat Jack Johnson, the first black World Heavyweight Champion boxer in 1910’s America. It’s racist, and it should never, ever be used. ↩︎
- Ocon accused of erratic driving, Bearman’s rejoin, seven cars overtaking after the chequered flag despite yellows still being on track, and the McLaren collision… ↩︎
- Remember – It carries a 10-point bonus on your F1 fantasy team. Popularity contests are fickle enough as is! ↩︎
