'Flashpoint' at Mercedes, ‘magic’ Lewis + Franco's finest - Canadian GP Review with Jolyon Palmer + Alex Jacques

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1:37To a good life's sleep.

1:42He's fourth Grand Prix victory in a row. Kimi Antonelli wins the Canadian Grand Prix.

1:49Jolyon Palmer:Not the way I wanted to win, but yeah, we'll take it. Even Antonelli, in his wildest dreams, wouldn't have predicted anything like this. You've got heartbreak for George and you feel that emotion. He knows that the title is slipping away as things stand. I thought we were heading to a collision, like the old Merc days. You could tell the body language has shifted, hasn't it? From happy days, really great, Kimi's alongside me in one and two, or vice versa, good points for the team. Feels different this weekend. Feels like the first flashpoint. I think this was Lewis's best weekend in a Ferrari Formula One car.

2:25It was like roll back the years Lewis. He looked capable of finding the magic again. Were we all thinking the same thing when we saw Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri on intermediate tyres? I was thinking, are we in Qatar? That's one of the most bizarre calls I've seen. And I was genuinely like, what on earth is going on?

2:51Welcome, everyone, to Montreal for F1 Nation's review of a stunning Canadian Grand Prix. I'm Tom Clarkson, and with me, a former F1 driver, Jolien Palmer, and commentator, Alex Jakes, the voices of F1 on F1 TV, Apple TV, and Netflix during the Montreal weekend. Guys, what a race. I love that one. What was the biggest headline for each of you guys?

3:16Jolyon Palmer:it's George Russell breaking down isn't it it's the moment the championship swings right towards Kimi an amazing fight and then just heartbreak for George halfway through the race ended the contest as a battle you knew Kimi was going to win and you just think five races in suddenly the momentum has shifted so much towards Kimi it's been an amazing turnaround he's frighteningly quick he's doing a great job and this was kind of on George's turf it was like a great film that could have been an all-time classic. I feel we got 30 laps of brilliant battling. Very rarely do you feel happy and exhausted on lap 30.

3:56But we were looking at each other going like, how do we keep covering this? Because there were points where we just, you know, jump cut to turn 10, Russell's wide again. They were pushing each other. Felt like the sort of race that you'd get later in the year where they were pushing each other to extreme heights and you knew you were going to get something defining for the championship. It's round five. That never happens in round five.

4:18Jolyon Palmer:It was like double disappointment, wasn't it? Because you've got the heartbreak for George and you feel that emotion. You could see it. I mean, it was so much. He knows that the title is slipping away as things stand. There's obviously a huge amount of time left and loads of races for him to gather it back. But the shift was already there and then that. But then you're also thinking the race was so good until that point. I wanted just to see more. I wasn't. A breather might have been all right because there was a lot. but JP on that topic we'll get on to what actually happened but who do you think would have won that Grand Prix had George not had that technical problem I think George probably had the edge still I mean he literally had the lead and that was quite important uh he was making errors at the hairpin and then it felt as soon as when Kimi got ahead I thought Kimi can go now but then he made the error at the hairpin gave it back to George and he wasn't easy to pass so so difficult to call it could have gone either way but maybe George in front there was also strategy that would have played out and being the lead driver at that point you're coming towards the pit stop phase it probably would have paid out well for him I thought Kimi was the faster driver actually or had the faster car would you agree JC he was all over the back of him wasn't he he had a good amount of core pace it's George Russell who took the pole positions George Russell who was able to overtake Antonelli and hold the lead more than Antonelli was to be honest I thought they were heading for a skirmish a proper skirmish if we'd gone the whole distance there's no way you can keep doing that lap after lap after lap pass and repass i thought we were heading to a collision but the old merc days we were building it up in comedy because we were genuinely you're like 30 30 something laps into it and you're like this is this is there's a lot going on for us in the booth let alone when you're thinking there's a race win on the line a title on the line doing it lap after lap they were making lots of little mistakes giving each other opportunities but you are just thinking Kimi nearly rear-ended George already the mental strain on those guys to do it for an hour and a half is is intense I don't think we've seen a Grand Prix ever where we've we've had that level of back and forth for that amount of time with mistakes you've got wheel to wheel battles you've got everything else on the line it's not just a freebie this is a championship defining moment and the mental stress is intense so I think if we were thinking a breather would be all right imagine Kimi when he sees George slow down you think okay I've probably won the race and my word maybe my heart rate can settle as well but when you look at the pace of the two guys all weekend let's bear in mind that you know Kimi had the upper hand in Miami and George held his hand up and said this isn't a good track for me just you wait until we go to Montreal I've been on pole there for the last two years it's my kind of racetrack 68 one thousandth of a second separated them in qualifying which makes me think that actually George although he was on pole would have been disappointed because he knows that on his track Kimi Kimi Antonelli was his equal so what does this mean going forward this is a stronghold isn't it and George Russell has been superb around here when he didn't have a championship capable car it's a different exam question though this year for George it's not turn up and win two Grand Prix a season it's win every single time you come to the circuit the fact that he was country mile behind in Miami and then comes here and he was a car's width away from Kimi Antonelli all weekend clearly shows that Antonelli's in a more comfortable place at this stage there's a long season to go but Antonelli has got the advantage over his teammate at the moment even Antonelli in his wildest dreams wouldn't have predicted anything like this four in a row to open your winning account in formula one it's he just has the measure of these regulations at the moment the interesting thing to me is to your point the way that george was almost playing the miami weekend like an away fixture it was almost like yeah but kimmy's always good here it's always it's his turf he was great here last year the gap was a few tenths it was it was reasonable all weekend it was like they were in in different cars and you thought okay he's kind of given up a little bit on miami bringing out the excuses on friday already it's a low grip track wait till we get to to montreal so it was like he is pinning a lot on being quick here and he was quick but it was way closer than it was in miami so if you go to a kimmy stronghold let's say and he blitzes George by three or four tens you can't then come to a George stronghold and it's 50-50 like it was so I think that's a big thing on top of the retirement it's the way that this is a track where George now three poles in a row but we are still debating as to whether who would have won the race and this is on paper one of his best tracks so it does it speaks volumes as to how good Kimmy is right now I will say hindsight is always 20-20 and I did think maybe Russell did not have he's fully on the pedal at the end of last year because Kimi beat him three times in the final five races but coming into this year and now after four Grand Prix wins in a row Kimi's racing Max Verstappen up the road from George Russell in Brazil Russell's won in Brazil in the past George Russell's run uh won in Vegas in the past Kimi's stint in Vegas was sensational to come through his overall race pace was unbelievable there were signs that he'd made a breakthrough even before we got to this regulation set it's a really good point about him and going forward are we going to see any tightening up because i feel the innocence of youth you don't know what you don't know and you you're just enjoying the moment you think you're going to get plenty of opportunities i feel kimmy's in that space so i don't think he's going to tighten up whereas george eighth season of formula one hasn't had a proper opportunity knows they don't come come along every time are we now in the territory psychologically where this is going to start playing on their minds, the innocence of one and the weight of the world on the other.

10:18Jolyon Palmer:I think you can see it, can't you? You can see, I don't know, George tightening up. You can feel the importance for him to win and the way that he was having to defend aggressively in the sprint. You could certainly see the carefree nature of Kimi. He was treating the grass like it was a perfectly decent bit of off-roading. Like any of those moments, you could be careering into the barrier, but he had no care in the world about throwing it around the outside of turn one, launching up the inside of turn eight a few trips wide at the final chicane and you just think oh with a few more years you might you might not be throwing your car into the same places but the youthful exuberance is what's making him I think super quick uh super aggressive and he is he's getting away with it isn't he at the moment so you can see both playing out and whilst he's on this winning run there's nothing to stop the youthful exuberance so you build up more more points lead at 43 points and you're thinking oh I've got a little bit of a buffer now so I can go for these audacious moves I can throw a car in and the pressure is nowhere near him I mean he is carefree right now whereas George is understandable if he was to tense up because this was George Russell's championship year this was from last year everyone was saying the Mercedes is going to be the the car to beat so it's George naturally because he was he was doing the job on Kimi your point is very good at the end of the year Kimi turned it around and started to look low-key like he could challenge George but you still thought George was walking through with the air of confidence took pole one in Melbourne and we're thinking okay it's a George championship fast forward a few races and it's not looking that way at all and the pressure then on him is is intense and do you think we're going to see Mercedes step in and stopping them race or Do you think they'll let him go?

12:04Good luck if you do try and step in. Because I think one of the things that was impressive from Antonelli learning from the sprint to the Grand Prix today is I feel that there was one point where he had to take evasive action into the final chicane. But I didn't feel like he placed his car in a position where he could have been batted off in the way that he did in the sprint. I felt he learned from the wheel-to-wheel battle of Russell in the sprint. so Mercedes have clearly reminded them of the number one rule between teammates don't touch each other it's inevitable if it's an inter-team battle evidence is the entire history of the Formula One World Championship so they can say what they like but ultimately when it's sports biggest prizes on the line they're going to clash at some point the job's never been harder has it

12:44Jolyon Palmer:because of the regs so you're getting these sort of yo-yo races still you you see that the guys are struggling to break one second which means you've got 30 laps of back and forth racing that's a hell of a lot of chances to come together when nico and lewis would would have it they might have one moment in a grand prix and it would be like all on this you've got to make it through or not and sometimes they clashed so even more so with lewis and max in 21 obviously different teams but there were flash points in a race where you think this is your chance you might wait 50 laps for another opportunity whereas in a way they've got a chance to back out of moves and go again with the with the way the regs are but naturally they're going to find themselves in position to shunt so much more often and we've already seen that the the amount of wheel to wheel back and forth they've had just this weekend alone is more than we saw in the entire season of Oscar Orlando last year can I take you to lap six of the sprint on Saturday George said you don't go around the outside of someone at turn one.

13:48Kimi tried it. And of course, do you think Kimi was right to be so upset? If you put a 19 year old in a Formula One car that can win races, I think you're going to get radio messages like that. I thought that was a, I think the reality by the time he got to Palmer and the interviews afterwards, he'd remembered his media training, but the reality, it came out on the radio, didn't it? I'll let the driver judge whether it was correct or not, but he didn't do it again for the Grand Prix. Did he? JP, was there anything off camera in that post sprint press conference you did in the pit lane, interview you did in the pit lane?

14:22Was there anything off camera, chats between them?

14:25Jolyon Palmer:You know, it was terse. It was really, Kimi got out the car. There was not a hint of a smile. There was just a, still a frustration there. They are really well media trained. I think Toto banging on the radio saying, wind it back. We need to keep it in house. It obviously worked. in the end it's a sprint and it cost him a point to Lando I mean arguably a couple if he had got past George but no you could just see that what it meant to him to have had that what he feels was a wrongdoing by being shuffled out wide I have to say it was an incredibly ambitious move he was going for he made a good fist of it to get as far up the outside as he did at the apex and it's natural, I think, for George to shove him wide.

15:11I think that is sort of racer's instinct there.

15:14Jolyon Palmer:But I can also understand why Kimi's on the radio. I think if I was in that position, I think you're going to naturally get on the radio because it's your teammate, it's a guy in-house, and you've just got to point to your team and think, he's just forced me off. I probably would do the same. It's just, I think, a natural instinct. But when Toto's then coming on the radio and telling you to shut up, you accept nothing's going to happen of it and you get your head down and that's basically what happened. But internally, no doubt, there's still disagreements. What did you think when they came to you then?

15:46They didn't look at each other. I was going to ask that. They came in separately, off camera, in the press conference. There was no banter at all. One thing that was interesting is that at the end of the press conference, they all get up to leave together and Kimi absolutely did not want to walk out with George. so he started yakking to you didn't he did start yakking to me about about the marathon of all things because i'm the only one who's ever run a marathon ever and that's all i ever talk about

16:18wearing a t-shirt that said ask me about the london marathon but it was interesting that he actually wanted he just came over to chat to me because he just did not want to walk out with george so there was you know tensions were high yeah you could tell the the body language has

16:31Jolyon Palmer:shifted hasn't it from happy days really great Kimmy's alongside me in one and two or vice versa good points for the team feels different this weekend yeah and it's gonna this is gonna play on isn't it we got this all season so we were talking teammate rivalries in that podcast a couple of weeks ago and we were saying in all of them you get a flashpoint feels like the flashpoint feels like the first flashpoint last year there were quite a few people watching who felt that it was almost antiseptic with the way that like, you know, it was over managed with something leveled at McLaren all the time.

17:03And the flashpoint, a couple of meters from where we're talking now by the pit wall, Lando immediately like that's on me. No need for an argument. No need for any debate. Shut it down immediately. That did not happen. That will not happen between George and Kimmy. And that's good for us. We love the drama TC.

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19:27Look, let's talk about Ferrari now, because no one told Lewis Hamilton that you can't go round the outside of someone at Turn 1, did they? Round the outside of Max Verstappen, no less. I mean, I think this was Lewis's best weekend in a Ferrari Formula 1 car. Would you guys agree?

19:46Jolyon Palmer:100 he was so happy confident it was like roll back the years lewis even just the way that the car was moving around but he was he was at one with it the whole way through it was great to see it's been the best lewis for years even in his final year with mercedes it felt like he was sometimes chasing it he knew he was leaving the team and everything um but this was it was a proper rollback lewis he's come to two tracks where he's had enormous success in the past in Shanghai and now in Montreal. And he looks like the Lewis that used to win here. And it's not so much where he finished. It's the body language of the car.

20:22It's the fact that he looked animated again. He looked like he was on the edge. He had a few errors in there. But the fact that he looked capable of finding the magic again, I think is the thing that he will take from this weekend.

20:34Jolyon Palmer:And when you think through the other good performances he's put in at Ferrari, there's not been a huge amount of them, but you'd say China this year. and he fended off Charles in that really long tussle. Great. Happy Lewis. It was good. You think sometimes, I mean, Melbourne was okay last year. Obviously, the China sprint was great, but the rest of the Grand Prix, a great day for Lewis was to be close with Charles, basically. He's obliterated him this weekend. Charles was absolutely fed up. He was saying it was the worst weekend ever, yesterday and today. Didn't want to hear from his engineer on the radio until the end, which speaks volumes of the pressure that Lewis put on him.

21:13But we're back into the sort of what's your favourite track territory because Charles has actually never been particularly great here, whereas Lewis has been great. This was his 11th podium here in Montreal. I want to ask you guys about simulators. There have been two races this year, prior to which Lewis has not been in the Ferrari simulator. One was China, the other one was here. He said in the press conference after the race that he will not be going in the simulator as part of his race prep again this year. If you're the guy in charge of the sim in Maranella, you're probably feeling a bit short-changed.

21:49I mean, JP, I mean, we'll start with you. How useful are simulators? If you're old school, like Lewis, do you need them?

21:59Jolyon Palmer:I would argue no, is the answer. He's got so much muscle memory of how to drive around circuits. He understands what he wants from the car. I think there's a new age of young driver that lives on the simulator and they do a lot. But the correlation is really difficult. We've got new regs, new cars, different ways of driving, different ways of deploying energy around the lap, which is changing lap on lap day on day. So unless the simulator is perfectly correlated to what you're going to get on the track, it's of negligible benefit anyway. Because you can't then plug and play on a Friday. You saw how dirty the track was on a Friday.

22:37Jolyon Palmer:It's evolving in all sorts of different ways. You've got wind direction that changes. So a driver like Lewis has been around only 20 years. If he doesn't feel like there's value in going on the sim, then there's probably, the value would be more on Ferrari's side to get his feedback to improve, maybe set up things. I'm sure the sim is working enough to, you know, to understand different setup options. Development options, absolutely. Correlation to improve the simulator even further. That's where the benefit would be. it'd be more for Ferrari than it would be for Lewis. They've got development drivers who do a lot of that work.

23:13Jolyon Palmer:That's the whole point of having a development driver on the simulator. Charles is still using the simulator, so he's not on the same page. I kind of think each to their own. Shumi never liked a sim, did he? When he left Ferrari, came back to Mercedes, the world had changed a little bit, and it was all right, hop on the sim, and it literally made him sick. So he stopped using them. Kimi Raikkonen and Ditto. That or the great drivers find really good excuses not to have to go in the sim. No, I think it's really interesting. But they do still, especially with a sprint weekend format, where you have to make so many changes over the weekend and you've got someone through there, you know, in the sim overnight.

23:50If it's not accurate, they need to make it more accurate.

23:54Jolyon Palmer:But the benefit of the sim is more for setup. It's bigger picture than helping your driver dial in. I think that's the key to this, is there's value in Ferrari having a simulator. I mean, I don't think the guy's going to hand in his resignation. I think that's enough. Lewis has proved me wrong. I'm sure there's still a lot of value in them having what will be a really fine-tuned tool. You see Red Bull, McLaren, some really sophisticated teams use their sim overnight, sometimes Friday to Saturday, and try a load of different setups that some peddlers done through the night in the UK. It's a bleak job, but it could be worse, I guess.

24:29Jolyon Palmer:but if you're Lewis Hamilton it's you know a day in a dark room pounding around somewhere that's not necessarily that relevant to what you've then got to do which of limited relevance I could see why he wants to focus on other things and the thing is when you turn up here if he'd have been awful scratching his head as to where he was going you'd say okay that's a big call but he's had his best weekend for a long time so it's tough to argue I'm fascinated by these intra-team battles right we've discussed George and Kimi and how one of them was really strong in Miami and we were coming here and George had to stamp his authority back on the team.

25:06And I feel we've got a similar situation developing at Ferrari. Lewis has come here and we're going next to Monaco, which is Charles' track. He's won there before. He was second last year. And actually, I think Ferrari probably might go really well there. They're a bit of a power deficit on a track like this, but that won't matter so much in Monaco. How do you see the immediate future for Ferrari and Monaco? It is a very good time for Charles Leclerc to be going to one of his great tracks. Obviously, he's home track, but it's a track where he's always been superbly quick, even if he always hasn't had the results.

25:40So the calendar has fallen nicely for him there. Ferrari, on the evidence that we've seen in the earlier rounds this year, surely have a chance to win that Grand Prix, because they are just superb through the slow stuff. I've been hanging my hat on that all year.

25:56Jolyon Palmer:Ferrari will win a race. If we go by Monaco and they're not that competitive, then I'm going to have to row back on that one. On the upside, I will do whoever wins, if it's not Ferrari, the loudest I've done in commentary. Palmer wrote them off. I feel like we didn't see how good the Merc was this weekend with its update. So it might still see everyone off in Monaco, right? Well, they still were good enough to top the sessions, weren't they? Might not have got the extremity of their performance out. And they'll be in the mix. I've got to say, on the evidence of his previous career, George has never had a brilliant run of it in Monaco.

26:37So it's not ideal from a George Russell point of view. But for Ferrari's inter-team battle, absolutely perfect for Charles Leclerc. Literally on his home streets. Even last year, he wasn't far off taking pole position, was he? So absolutely perfect for him to go there. And if Lewis can beat him there, then we've got the start of a different narrative. What about Red Bull? Max Verstappen's first podium of the season, but it was the lowest step after Lewis passed him around the outside. He seemed pretty upbeat, I thought, after the race, Max. I think he wasn't happy with the car all weekend. So to come away with their first podium of the season was a decent result.