McLaren’s Montreal miscues give F1 rivals hope for rest of 2025
Even without the collision between Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri four laps from the finish, the Canadian Grand Prix would have been a weekend to forget for championship leader McLaren. Sunday’s podium celebrations were the first without a papaya-clad driver this year, and the grid a couple of hours earlier was the first without one of the team’s cars on the front row.
Anomalous results are almost always present in otherwise-dominant championship campaigns — think back to Red Bull‘s single shocking weekend in Singapore 2023 during a season in which it won the 21 other races — but they are often the most revealing races of the year. From a performance perspective, the 2025 Canadian Grand Prix was far from a disaster for McLaren, which remained within a few seconds of a podium right up until Norris tangled with Piastri at the start of lap 67, but it did show the potential for bumps in the road over the rest of the season.
Before arriving in Canada, McLaren had anticipated Montreal’s track layout — with its long straights punctuated by chicanes defined by quick direction changes — would not showcase the strengths of its car. And while the alarm bells won’t be ringing back at base in Woking, England, the result will provide some fuel for cautious optimism among McLaren’s rivals.
With the collision between the McLarens sapping up all of team principal Andrea Stella’s media session on Sunday, we have to rewind 24 hours to find the team’s best explanation of the lackluster performance in Canada. It’s possible that either Piastri or Norris might have had the pace to win in Montreal had they started the race from the front and led into Turn 1, but after the Australian qualified third and the Brit seventh on Saturday afternoon, Stella was not shying away from the car’s lack of performance at the circuit.
“I think one of the reasons why this circuit has been a little bit of a struggle — which we have seen pretty much straight away in Free Practice 1, where it was difficult at the time to put together laps for the drivers — is we realized that the car wasn’t able to generate much grip,” he said. “And we think that the reason is that even if it’s low-speed corners, there’s actually a lot of braking and traction [in Montreal]. There’s not much mid-corner phase in itself. You are either on the brakes or on the throttle, and in both conditions, we have to say that the car struggled a bit to start with.”
If Canada’s track layout is at one end of a scale of circuit types on the F1 calendar, the Circuit de Barcelona Catalunya, where McLaren took a one-two victory at the Spanish Grand Prix two weeks earlier, would likely be at the other. The high-speed, long-duration corners of the Spanish track is where the McLaren’s supreme downforce and car balance was most evident this year — to the tune of more than 0.4 seconds over its closest rivals in qualifying.
What’s more, the McLaren’s ability to protect its tires from overheating and therefore limit performance degradation during a race was also evident in Spain and, likewise, of little relevance in Canada. Managing tires has been a strength of McLaren’s throughout the 2025 season and remains a trait that every team on the grid is striving to replicate, but the smooth track surface in Montreal meant it barely factored on Sunday.
Rather than combatting overheating, drivers were trying to prevent a phenomenon known as graining, when the tire surface tears up early in its life and creates balls of rubber that reduce the grip level. The problem was particularly evident on Piastri’s front left tire during the race — although he was not alone in suffering.
McLaren’s relative struggles opened the door for a rival to capitalize, and as it happened, the same track characteristics that hindered the championship leaders helped Mercedes unlock significant potential from its car. The Silver Arrows capitalized, with George Russell claiming the win and Kimi Antonelli standing on the first podium of his nascent in third.
One of the main difficulties Mercedes has faced since the current set of regulations were introduced in 2022 is finding a car setup that offers a good balance across low- and high-speed corners. There is a tendency for this generation of car to understeer in low-speed corners, while attempts to increase front downforce runs the risk of unbalancing the car with a snappy and unpredictable rear end in high-speed corners.
Mercedes has made progress in finding a better balance in its car throughout the past year, but Montreal’s abundance of one corner type (low-speed) simplifies the equation. Nail the setup to work through the four chicanes and at the hairpin at Turn 10 and there are no meaningful high-speed corners elsewhere on the circuit to catch you out.
The other advantage of an absence of long-duration high-speed corners is that it’s much easier to keep tire temperature under control. The quick direction changes between the walls in Montreal reward driver confidence and a stable car under braking, but are not long enough to put any real strain through the rubber.
Add to that a smooth track surface and the tires were not as prone to overheating — even with a track temperature of 50 degrees Celsius on race day.
“I guess you need to look at the track layout,” Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff said when asked to explain his car’s strong performance over the weekend. “Montreal was always good to us, it lacks the typical high-speed corners where we suffer more in the heat. That’s one, and number two is quite a smooth asphalt here, which is less abrasive and therefore less damaging to our car that suffers from rear tire degradation and overheating.”
Mercedes also raced a new rear suspension layout in Montreal that had only previously been used in practice at Imola before being left off the car for the rest of the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix weekend. It was designed with Mercedes’ tire temperature weaknesses in mind, and while it likely provided some positives in Canada, it will need a sterner test on a more demanding layout to be classed as a genuine game-changer for the team.
“I think we brought the new rear geometry for the particular [tire overheating] problem that we had, the rear [tire] surface overheating, and we weren’t quite sure about the results in Imola, because they were worse than we expected,” Wolff explained. “And there I think taking it off was the right thing to do, and bringing it on here, because hopefully the development direction is correct long term.
“But it’s always, in these kind of regulations, you never know whether you land development or whether you don’t. Correlation has been difficult, particularly for us. And then, I think there is other factors at play here also, the track layout is just different, the asphalt is different, and there is never one magic solution that makes the car go from a, let’s say, best-case-podium car to a dominant winner.”
Russell added: “We’re under no illusions that this really suited the strengths of our car the same way as it did last year. But for the majority of the circuits, we know it’s a bit of a challenge, and that’s why this is the first weekend both of us are on the podium. But it’s great to see that when we get that chance, we take it.”
All of which means Sunday’s result is likely just a blip for McLaren rather than a genuine turning point in the championship. But proof, nonetheless, that there is still potential for surprises over the rest of the 2025 season.
Source: espn.com