Red Bull definitely has wings in Formula One.
Max Verstappen won Sunday’s Canadian Grand Prix on Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve, leading the 70-lap race from start to finish. The Red Bull driver finished ahead of Fernando Alonso of Aston Martin and Lewis Hamilton of Mercedes, winning for the sixth time in eight races this season, including four in a row. Verstappen finished second in the other two races behind Red Bull teammate Sergio Pérez.
Verstappen is running away with the drivers’ championship with 195 points, 69 more than Perez and 78 more than Alonso, who sits in third place. Red Bull is flying away from the competition in the constructor standings with 321 points — the same amount that second-place Mercedes (167) and third-place Aston Martin (154) have combined.
Verstappen is a fantastic driver — this was his second straight win at the Canadian Grand Prix and he won the driving championship the last two years — but he’s also driving what is by far the best car, powered by Honda.
During the drivers’ parade before Sunday’s race, Hamilton was asked about starting third on the grid, behind Verstappen and Alonso.
“I don’t know if this is the closest we can see Max in front of us, so hopefully we can try and attack today,” he said.
Hamilton and Alonso did try to attack Verstappen, but they couldn’t catch him — not even when the Red Bull driver made his one pit stop on Lap 43, which took only 2.7 seconds to change the tires. Verstappen won by nine seconds — an eternity in F1 — making this the closest race of the season.
“It’s not a frustration anymore,” Hamilton said. “It was. You know how it is and you know what you’re faced with, and there’s nothing I can do about their amazing performance. It’s likely that they will win every race going forward this year, unless the Astons and us (Mercedes) put a lot more performance on the cars or their car doesn’t finish.
“We’ve got some work to do,” added Hamilton, who recorded his second straight podium finish after placing second at the Spanish Grand Prix. “But it’s not as frustrating. I’m happy to firstly be back in the mix, and I’m just hoping at some stage we can have a little bit more level (playing field) so we can get back to some of the good races we had back in 2021, and to have all three of us (including Alonso) in a super-tight battle would be sick.”
Hamilton has seven driving championships — tied for the most with Michael Schumacher — and has won a record 103 races. But he has now gone 31 races without a victory, dating back to the 2021 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.
Verstappen’s domination this season brings back memories of 1997 when Jacques Villeneuve won the F1 championship and beat out Larry Walker for the Lou Marsh Award (now called the Northern Star Award) as Canada’s top athlete. That year Walker became the first Canadian to win an MVP award in Major League Baseball, voted the best player in the National League after batting .366 with 49 homers, 130 RBIs and 33 stolen bases for the Colorado Rockies.
TSN aired a terrific documentary in 2019 titled Man vs. Machine (it’s still available on Crave) as part of its Engraved on a Nation series looking at the debate surrounding Villeneuve and Walker’s rivalry for the Lou Marsh Award. In the documentary, Walker says his comment was blown out of proportion, leading people to believe he didn’t think Villeneuve was a real athlete.
“I’m not going to get behind a wheel like Villeneuve and, vice versa, he’s not going to hit a 97-mile-an-hour fastball,” said Walker, who started his major-league career with the Expos. “So I tried to laugh it off as best I could, but it got blown out of proportion, unfortunately.”
There’s no doubt F1 drivers are exceptional athletes, and Villeneuve explained why in the documentary.
Still, F1 isn’t always a level playing field.
Villeneuve, who left Williams and switched to the BAR F1 team in 1999, never won another race after earning the Lou Marsh Award 1997.
Walker won the Lou Marsh Award in 1998 and in 2020 became only the second Canadian — after Fergie Jenkins — inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.
