Mickey the Mouth
The Syndicate News Wire
- May 21, 2026
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Andrea Kimi Antonelli landed second on the grid for Saturday’s Canadian Grand Prix Sprint at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve on Friday evening, and he was open about how it came together – or rather, how it nearly didn’t.
Antonelli heads into this weekend holding a 20-point championship lead over Mercedes team-mate George Russell, and the Silver Arrows came to Montreal armed with what amounts to eight individual upgrades, the team’s first major upgrade of the 2026 season.
That package clearly carried genuine pace. The session result, though, was a harder-earned one than the timing sheet suggests.
Antonelli said after: “The session was not clean at all. I did a mistake in SQ2 and that threw me off a little bit. Then I decided to go for lap one on soft without doing prep and – tires were a bit cold and it was just a messy session, but still P2 and very close. So the potential is definitely there and we’ll do better tomorrow.”
P2 with a margin of three tenths over the cars behind isn’t a bad outcome from a session the driver himself describes as chaotic. Asked whether that gap was representative of where Mercedes genuinely stands relative to the field, Antonelli pointed at the new hardware:
“Yeah, for sure. I mean, we brought the upgrade and that’s what it was giving to us in terms of performance. So of course we still need to understand a little bit more the package, because the the balance has changed a little bit, but overall, it seems to to have given us a little bit of an edge again, but yeah, we’ll focus on tomorrow.”
The package covers the front wing, front wing endplate, front and rear corner assemblies, floorboard, floor corner and floor body, with the most prominent change being to the front wing itself – elements dropped in height and run into the footplate in a bid to generate cleaner airflow rearward.
With Canada hosting a Sprint weekend, teams had just one practice session to understand new parts before competitive running began, making any useful data from a disrupted FP1 a genuine luxury.
McLaren brought the second part of a two-step upgrade to Montreal as well, and added a significant haul of parts to the package they introduced in Miami – so the pressure to demonstrate that the W17 improvements are real, not just fast on paper, was there from the outset.
On the early evidence of Sprint Qualifying, they held. Antonelli’s pace advantage, and whether it can hold off the charging McLarens for the remainder of the weekend, is now the central question heading into Saturday. A teenager who can bank a front row start on a messy evening in Montreal looks well placed to answer it.
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Antonelli heads into this weekend holding a 20-point championship lead over Mercedes team-mate George Russell, and the Silver Arrows came to Montreal armed with what amounts to eight individual upgrades, the team’s first major upgrade of the 2026 season.
That package clearly carried genuine pace. The session result, though, was a harder-earned one than the timing sheet suggests.
Antonelli said after: “The session was not clean at all. I did a mistake in SQ2 and that threw me off a little bit. Then I decided to go for lap one on soft without doing prep and – tires were a bit cold and it was just a messy session, but still P2 and very close. So the potential is definitely there and we’ll do better tomorrow.”
The Upgrade Did What It Was Supposed To
P2 with a margin of three tenths over the cars behind isn’t a bad outcome from a session the driver himself describes as chaotic. Asked whether that gap was representative of where Mercedes genuinely stands relative to the field, Antonelli pointed at the new hardware:
“Yeah, for sure. I mean, we brought the upgrade and that’s what it was giving to us in terms of performance. So of course we still need to understand a little bit more the package, because the the balance has changed a little bit, but overall, it seems to to have given us a little bit of an edge again, but yeah, we’ll focus on tomorrow.”
The package covers the front wing, front wing endplate, front and rear corner assemblies, floorboard, floor corner and floor body, with the most prominent change being to the front wing itself – elements dropped in height and run into the footplate in a bid to generate cleaner airflow rearward.
With Canada hosting a Sprint weekend, teams had just one practice session to understand new parts before competitive running began, making any useful data from a disrupted FP1 a genuine luxury.
McLaren brought the second part of a two-step upgrade to Montreal as well, and added a significant haul of parts to the package they introduced in Miami – so the pressure to demonstrate that the W17 improvements are real, not just fast on paper, was there from the outset.
On the early evidence of Sprint Qualifying, they held. Antonelli’s pace advantage, and whether it can hold off the charging McLarens for the remainder of the weekend, is now the central question heading into Saturday. A teenager who can bank a front row start on a messy evening in Montreal looks well placed to answer it.
Continue reading...