Aussie watch ahead of the F1® Canadian Grand Prix 2024
Matt Clayton
Thursday, 6 June 2024
Put the coffee on, grab a blanket and settle in for a public holiday Monday dose of Formula 1® from a track where action is a raised kerb or lurking wall away – Montreal is on the menu for round nine of the season.
Anyone want to watch a Formula 1® race? Yeah, us too … after a monotonous Monaco Grand Prix where the pace was slower than F2 on a wet day, it’s full-throttle ahead to this weekend’s Canadian Grand Prix (June 7-9), and the sport’s annual visit to one of the best cities on the calendar (trust us) in Montreal. Outside of Melbourne, naturally…
Monaco was fantastic to see our own Oscar Piastri finish second at the most famous GP of all; less so were the seven overtakes in total, 10 of the 20 drivers spending the entire race in the same position, and 12 starting and finishing in the same spot. As a colourful conga line, it ticked every box … but Canada will raise the excitement meter, as it typically does.
The Circuit Gilles Villeneuve on the man-made Ile Notre-Dame is a highly unusual layout, chicanes with car-munching kerbs that need to be attacked in the first two sectors ceding to a final sector that starts with the track’s best overtaking spot at the Turn 10 hairpin, and the final chicane at Turns 13-14 where someone will undoubtedly add their name to the list of victims at the ‘Wall of Champions’ on the outside of the last turn.
What are the talking points.
Ricciardo, 10 years on
Has it really been a decade since we watched, bleary-eyed in the early hours of an early winter Monday morning, Daniel Ricciardo become a Grand Prix winner for the first time? Time moves fast in F1, and the grinning, buoyant 24-year-old who was the sport’s ascendent star then still has that smile, but it’s becoming more forced as his 2024 campaign continues to sputter after a brief surge.
As one of those 12 drivers who finished where he started in Monaco (12th), Ricciardo still hasn’t scored a point in a Grand Prix this year; all five of his 2024 tally came in that superb Miami sprint, which is becoming a distant speck in the rear-view. With RB teammate Yuki Tsunoda scoring points in his past five finishes and making Q3 six times to Ricciardo’s one, the pace in the car is there … and Ricciardo knows he needs to unlock it.
Ricciardo’s Canada pedigree is good – he has another podium (third in 2017) and three other top-six finishes to his name as well as that 2014 victory – but a quirk of the calendar and his half-season 2023 sabbatical means he’s raced there just once in the past five years. Q3 is a box he’s focused on ticking this weekend.
Piastri the ‘local’ favourite?
It’s become a popular Oscar Piastri social media staple of recent races – the McLaren driver openly wondering if he has some roots in whatever country F1 lands in, and being ‘adopted’ by Charles Leclerc in Monaco, the pair keeping their 1-2 result in the ‘family’ in The Principality. It’s a stretch, but it’s Piastri’s stretch, so we’re running with it …
Where Piastri has been running of late is right at the sharp end, no matter the track, destination or questionable heritage claims. With a little luck, he could have had podiums at the past three Grands Prix (Miami, Emilia-Romagna and Monaco), and he’s spent 176 of the past 198 laps inside the top five – that’s 88 per cent for the driver of car 81.
This time last year, McLaren was still a race away from the transformation of the MCL60 in Austria that began to turn their season around; Piastri started eighth and finished six-tenths of a second out of the points in 11th – and beat teammate Lando Norris doing it. Another podium 12 months on? It’s in play.
Doohan the Alpine watch
A bad pun from an even worse Monaco Grand Prix for the French squad, sure; but one that suddenly has some legitimacy after the intra-team disaster two weekends ago for Alpine, where Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly came to blows on lap one. Ocon would have been sore after his attack on Gasly sent his A524 chassis briefly skywards before landing with a thud; his ears would have probably hurt more, after team principal Bruno Famin gave Ocon both barrels in public and private afterwards.
When questioned on French TV about what his reaction would be to the incident, Famin’s response – according to our high-school French, at least – could be interpreted as “we will take drastic action”. And that was before this week’s announcement that Ocon is leaving Alpine (née Renault) at the of the year after spending the past five years at Enstone.
Coincidence or not? We’ll never know, but what we do is two things. One, Ocon carries a five-place grid penalty into Montreal, making this weekend likely to be as much of a write-off as Monaco was. And two, the team surely won’t hesitate to bench its departing Frenchman if the tetchy teammates trade elbows again – and with 16 rounds left, that feels almost inevitable. That the team’s reserve driver Jack Doohan was called in to drive Ocon’s car in Montreal’s first free practice session on Friday at the last minute tells you all you need to know …
The Formula 1® Canadian Grand Prix 2024 will be available to watch live on Foxtel and Kayo. See our article What time does the F1® Canadian Grand Prix 2024 start for Australians? for your local timings.
