Canadian Grand Prix: Where F1's big (and small) beasts battle it out

I had a Canadian staying with me a few days ago. He hated Canada.

Canada was ‘boring’, Canada was ‘tedious’, he grew up in Toronto and it took four days to get anywhere that wasn’t another dull, flat, torpor-inducing landscape.

Harsh. Canada has bears. It has Justin Bieber, Bryan Adams, Michael Buble, Jim Carrey, Seth Rogan… OK, hold that thought.

It has the Canadian Grand Prix. Ah, that’s more like it. Canada does do F1 well, even if you’ve only heard of three Canadian drivers…

Is this the chance for Lance?

The three Canuck drivers you know are Gilles and Jacques Villeneuve (both pretty handy at scoring F1 points), and Williams’ current rookie Lance Stroll (not so much).

Stroll has struggled to find his F1 groove and has failed to beat or out-qualify his veteran team-mate, Felipe Massa, all season. It’s not been the most encouraging start to a Formula 1 career.

He’s certainly not showing any signs of being the next Verstappen, Vettel, Raikkonen or even Massa, and he will be under a lot of pressure at his first home grand prix.

Williams deputy team principal Claire Williams has come out fighting for the youngster, quite fairly observing that plenty of top-notch drivers failed to impress in their opening races.

Stroll could do a lot worse for himself than sticking it to Massa this weekend and proving to his doubters that he has the talent, as well as the money, to survive in F1. That doesn’t seem particularly likely, though, does it.

But the rookie can take some comfort from the fact that, of the 13 F1 drivers Canada has produced, he is definitely not the worst performer.

That dubious honour goes to Al Pease, an English-born Canadian who was a good enough driver to make it into the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame – and an unfortunate enough to be the only person kicked out of an F1 race for being too slow.

Battle of the big beasts

For one weekend in Canada, moose, bears and wolverines play second-fiddle to Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton.

Conventional wisdom has it that Hamilton should have this race sewn up. He’s won here five times and is the only current driver to have triumphed at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve more than once.

And he has that Mercedes lump sitting behind him, on a circuit with long straights that should give a big advantage to more powerful engines.

However… those Mercedes W08 cars are twitchy beasts and if the team can’t get them set up properly, both Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas will struggle at the chicanes. This is a circuit that hammers the brakes and, unless a driver has complete confidence in their set-up, lap time will bleed away at corner after corner.

And then there’s the small matter of tyres. Hamilton in particular has really struggled to get his tyres working this season, the Mercs managing to hold a lot of heat in the outer parts of the tyre but struggling to get core temperatures up to where they need to be.

The problem has been most pronounced with the softer tyres – which will be used in Montreal. Canada may have been kind to Hamilton in years gone by but this could be a frustrating weekend for the Brit.

Vettel, meanwhile, comes off the back of the Monaco Grand Prix as the man in the driving seat, as it were.

He outperformed the Mercedes and he outperformed his team-mate Kimi Raikkonen too, claims of team orders notwithstanding.

The Ferraris have looked far more planted than the Mercs this season and, as long as there are no reliability worries, you’d have to fancy Vettel will continue his record of finishing first or second at every race – unless the seagulls of doom intervene again.

Seagulls of doom?

Surely you remember Vettel’s nemesis, the Canadian Turn 1 Seagull?

Actually, there were two of the birds, and they forced Vettel into avoiding action last year.

He later gatecrashed an interview with race winner Hamilton to joke that Lewis won because he was ‘not braking for animals…’.

The Circuit Gilles Villeneuve has also seen incursions by gophers and groundhogs, so don’t be surprised if Mother Nature throws a spanner – or a seagull – in the works.

Meanwhile, in the slow lane…

Another creature to look out for in Canada is the Lesser-Spotted Alonso.

Fresh from his adventures at the Indy 500 (pictured), where he was named Rookie of the Year despite his Honda engine blowing up (you don’t say), Alonso is, for now at least, properly fired up.

The thing is, this is a circuit that demands a powerful, reliable engine – rather than the wheezy, fragile Honda power unit that has crippled McLaren for so long.

So, while Alonso may drag his car into a respectable qualifying position, no one is expecting him to register McLaren’s first points of the season here.

What we are expecting is more rumour around McLaren’s strained relationship with Honda.

Try this one for size. McLaren take a chance and sever their lucrative ties with Honda, who continue to wrestle with F1 through their Sauber deal.

McLaren, meanwhile, stick a Mercedes power unit in their 2018 cars, building a chassis-engine combo that is strong enough to challenge for the title if Mercedes decide to pull out of running their own team near the end of the decade.

Alonso leaves McLaren to go race anywhere else, just as the team finally start to make genuine progress – which has been a hallmark of Alonso’s career, to be fair.

Jolyon Palmer moves to McLaren and wraps up the championship with five races to spare… didn’t see that coming, did you?

On the topic of Palmer, he’s in the weeds at Renault and, even more than Lance Stroll, needs to pull a result out of the bag in Canada.

Just once, I’d like to see an interview in which Jolyon isn’t on the defensive, just to remind us how he drives when he’s in a positive frame of mind.

Talking of which, a special mention to Robert Kubica, who won the 2008 Canadian Grand Prix in a Sauber but was forced out of F1 in 2011 after a horrible rallying accident.

Earlier this week, he completed 115 laps in a test session for Renault. Kubica was driving a 2012-spec Lotus and, despite having only limited movement in his right arm, put in some good laps. Some reports suggested he’d been faster than Renault reserve driver Sergei Sirotkin, who is himself one of those in the frame to replace Palmer.

It was a bittersweet return to an F1 car for the Polish star, who said he was proud of his performance but it also showed what he had lost.

That 2008 win in Canada is the only time Sauber have topped the podium and is a reminder of the talent that F1 lost when Kubica had his crash. Motorsport, as they say, is dangerous.