It’s been over 18 months since Mercedes last won an F1 race, courtesy of Russell at Interlagos toward the end of 2022. For a team that serially dominated for close to a decade, the gap has felt like a lifetime.
There were many false hopes and perceived breakthroughs in that time as Mercedes tried to remedy its troublesome car concept under these regulations. Fashes of pace that never sustained through to be truly competitive at the front. But with pole on Saturday, Russell gave a sign the latest updates have moved the team in the right direction.
“It’s such a buzz, it’s been a while since we’ve experienced this feeling,” Russell said. “It’s been a little while to be able to get back in the fight, and we’ve almost felt like all that hard work hasn’t been paying off.”
It has now.
Managing the race at the front will be tough for Russell, particularly with Verstappen on the front row. “It doesn’t get much stronger,” Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff said of that prospect on the run to the first corner. “If (Russell) can stay in the lead, that would be good.”
Mercedes will go into race day for the first time in a long time genuinely believing it has a chance. “We’re going to go for victory,” Russell said. “The car is genuinely really, really fast at the moment.”
What a difference two weeks has made for Ferrari. Riding high off Leclerc’s Monaco victory (and Sainz’s third-place finish), the team was brought firmly back to earth in Montreal on Saturday as neither of its cars made it through to Q3. Leclerc and Sainz will start 11th and 12th.
The signs were there through FP3 that it could be a tricky session for Ferrari, with Leclerc saying the car felt “extremely slow.” So it proved through qualifying, where Leclerc admitted he was surprised to have been so far off the pace — to the point that six teams out-qualified Ferrari.
It was a confusing situation for Leclerc, who struggled for grip through the opening complex of corners throughout Saturday’s sessions and then felt the issue “snowball” through the rest of the lap.
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Sainz was equally puzzled. “You never expect to go from fighting for a win and pole position to being out in Q2, but this is Formula One,” he said. “I’ve seen worse things happen, and we will go back and analyze why we’re struggling around here.
After all the buzz around Ferrari and the tentative talk of it mounting some challenge to Red Bull in the championships, this setback will be a tough pill to swallow. Sainz felt some factors could “spice up the race,” including the high levels of tire graining. But the reality is that both he and Leclerc will be in damage limitation mode at a track where it seemed before the weekend there’d be an opportunity to fight for another win.
