George Russell’s Canadian Grand Prix ended on lap 30 with a battery failure, and the race he had hoped would reset his season instead pushed Kimi Antonelli further ahead in the championship. Antonelli won at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal after the pair swapped the lead repeatedly early on, then held on when Russell was forced out.
Russell came into Canada needing a result that matched the promise of his pace. He had taken pole after winning the sprint pole and the sprint race battle, and Montreal had been a happy place before this weekend: he won there last year and had taken two poles in a row at the circuit before Sunday’s race. But the British driver was lost to a technical failure just as the contest between Mercedes’ two young contenders was tightening.
The race itself had hardly settled before the result began to matter in a bigger way. Russell and Antonelli exchanged the lead repeatedly, with the 19-year-old keeping the pressure on through the opening stages and staying close enough that Russell could not build the cushion he wanted. By the time Russell’s battery gave up, Antonelli was already in control of the momentum as much as the timing screen.
That mattered because the points gap is now the story. Antonelli leads Russell by 43 points in the world championship after Canada, a margin that Russell described with the bluntness of a driver who knows the season is slipping away. “Right now it’s his to lose,” he said in Montreal. “He is so many points ahead.” He added: “It feels like the gods don’t want me to be in this fight.”
The frustration has been building for weeks. Russell won the first round in Australia, but in China he had two technical problems in qualifying, in Japan he was caught out by the timing of the safety car and finished fourth, and in Miami he was off the pace while Antonelli won there too. Canada was supposed to be the reset because the circuit suits him and because he had won there last year. Instead, it became another race where he lost ground without ever getting a full chance to answer Antonelli on the track.
There was still a hard edge to the way Russell framed his position after the failure. “I’ve got nothing to lose,” he said, before adding: “It is, of course, frustrating, but I want to be in that fight. Hopefully, the luck will turn.” It was the kind of line that makes sense only when the results have already done the damage.
Antonelli’s win changes the season in a simple way: with 17 meetings remaining, he is the driver everyone else is chasing. Russell is not out of the picture, but he has lost the buffer that a strong start in Montreal might have rebuilt. The next races will tell whether Canada was just another bad break or the point where the championship began to tilt for good.
