Sergio Perez, Racing Point, Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, 2019

F1 drivers will have to avoid Montreal’s kerbs in new cars – Gasly

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In the round-up: Drivers will need a new approach around Circuit Gilles Villeneuve this year, says Pierre Gasly.

In brief

2022 cars must avoid kerb-riding in Montreal

Drivers will be forced to abandon their kerb riding approach to the Canadian circuit because of the stiffer 2022 cars, Gasly predicted. “This year the Montreal circuit will be really challenging, especially with these new cars that are very stiff, much more so than their predecessors,” he said.

“The big kerbs and the high speeds will be a real test as will the final corner and the famous Wall of Champions. We will have to avoid the kerbs a lot more, whereas in the past you needed to ride over them to do a quick lap.”

Gasly is not confident his team will be as competitive at this temporary venue as they were at the previous two. “Although it’s another street circuit like the last two races, it’s a much faster layout with quicker corners,” he said, making it “on paper” more difficult for AlphaTauri.

Norris ‘wants to believe’ McLaren improvement is not track-specific

Lando Norris is hoping McLaren’s in-season improvements show an overall gain and are not track-specific. “I want to believe, and I think I have some confidence in saying that we’ve improved the car throughout most of these areas. And what we need now is in general, just a whole package upgrade.

“It’s handling reasonably well. There’s definitely types of characteristics that I, personally, as a driver, I still want more from the car and it’s just hard to go in that direction.”

However, Norris cautioned that the full range of the calendar’s tracks had yet to be seen. “I think there are still some slightly tougher areas maybe. I want to believe in general we probably improved the car, on average, through all the tracks.

“There’s still a few which we are yet to go to, which we struggled at a lot last season. And I think that’s a bit different in terms of characteristics to other ones we’ve been, places like Zandvoort and things like that, so we’re still yet to explore all of the ranges of types of corners and tracks and so on.”

Alfa Romeo will solve soft tyre warm-up for Canada – Pujolar

Valtteri Bottas, Alfa Romeo, Baku Street Circuit, 2022
Bottas should have a quicker car this weekend
Alfa Romeo’s head of trackside engineering, Xevi Pujolar, is confident the team will be able to maximise performance from their first push laps in Canada after struggling to turn on the soft tyres during Baku qualifying.

Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu were eliminated in Q2 after both drivers needed a second push-lap to bring the C5 soft tyres into the optimal temperature window. It came after the team experienced similar challenges with the C5 in Monaco.

With the three softest compounds in Pirelli’s tyres range being used again in Montreal this weekend, Pujolar is confident the team will be able to turn their tyres on more quickly.

“In Monaco, we had some difficulties, but that was different, Pujolar explained. “We’ve been working since Monaco. We changed the configuration of the car.

“If you see what the level of performance we had with Zhou – because with Valtteri we have something different – then we can say that the problems from Monaco were gone. Now [in Baku], some competitors are able to extract more performance from the first timed lap. For us, for the first timed lap, we were struggling more. We were getting performance from the second push lap. This is something that we are working on.

“I think we are getting there in Q2, but then we cannot make more progress. I think for Montreal, we don’t see a reason why we should not be on top of it. But the problems from Monaco, they are gone.”

Caldwell calls debut F1 test “unbelievable”

Formula 2 driver and Alpine Academy member Olli Caldwell said his first F1 test at Silverstone yesterday was “unbelievable”. He drove a 2021-specification Alpine A521 at the home of the British Grand Prix.

“I’m quite speechless, to be honest,” said Caldwell. “There’s nothing I could even compare it to, it was everything I expected and more. There’s nothing you can really do to prepare for how it feels.

“It’s incomparable to F2, even though it’s just one category up. Just everything is more – the speed, the downforce, the braking, everything. The buttons – there’s probably 50 more buttons than I’m used to, so. A lot better. I’m looking forward to the step up if it ever comes.”

Formula 2 will race at Silverstone in two weeks’ time. Caldwell expects the test will pay off when he returns.

“Just because everything’s quicker and you have to work harder and faster to make the maximum of the car. So I think going back to F2, the car’s slower so it should give me more time to think. I’m looking forward to coming back here and racing and seeing how the track feels compared to F1.”

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Comment of the day

As drivers wrangle with how blame should be apportioned when qualifying sessions are interrupted by red or yellow flags, @Stefmeister wonders why traffic seems to be more and more of a problem:

It always surprises me that we have all these complaints about drivers going slowly and impeding etc… now when we didn’t in the past at times when there were many more cars, Much larger performance deficits between the cars (and drivers) with far less data available, spottier team radio reception and much smaller mirrors (and of course if you go back a bit further they didn’t have any data or radio).

Was it less of an issue in the past because everyone just accepted things as been part of the sport and so didn’t complain about it as much? Were drivers more aware of cars coming up behind them and more willing to get out of the way? Or maybe they were just better at making there way through any traffic they encountered (Also considering how blue flags worked as only a warning rather than a call to jump out of the way)?

And on yellow/red flags. It’s no doubt frustrating if your lap gets hindered by them but I don’t like the ‘IndyCar rule’ of losing lap times and so don’t want to see it adopted by F1. If a driver is suspected of doing something intentionally then investigate it and penalise him if he has. But a genuine mistake shouldn’t suffer further penalties.
@Stefmeister

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday to Plushpile and Jennikate Wallace!

On this day in motorsport

  • 20 years ago today Lewis Hamilton scored his first victory in a racing car, in the Formula Renault 2.0 UK series at Thruxton. He led home Jamie Green and Danny Watts. Susie Wolff, nee Stoddart, now the wife of Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff, finished 16th.

Author information

Hazel Southwell
Hazel is a motorsport and automotive journalist with a particular interest in hybrid systems, electrification, batteries and new fuel technologies....

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7 comments on “F1 drivers will have to avoid Montreal’s kerbs in new cars – Gasly”

  1. Regarding COTD, depending how far you want to go back, there was never really an issue with traffic back in the 70s / 80s / early 90s as we had such long unrestricted practice and qualifying sessions, especially in the days of Fri and Sat qualifying. Even with the 1 hour/ 12 lap format in the 90s, you would only get a few cars on track at once, as the small teams would want to run earlier in order to get rare TV time.
    It’s only really Q1 nowadays where you have all 20 cars on track at once spread over the whole length of the track.
    I think another reason traffic is worse is because of the forever need to preserve tyres, engines, etc. You never used to see such drastically slower out and in laps back in the days of unlimited resources, but that’s not a direction we can go back to.

    1. If Liberty Media wants more action on track and less practise why not make Q1 a two part session. Somehow decide who are the first 10 to go out and who are the latter once. Reduce FP3 to 30min session for quali and if they are forcing the sprint to the weekend it should fit up nicely at saturday. I don’t know if I like this idea but it could happen.

  2. Slow driving, impeding and drivers being blocked during qually has been a constant since I’ve been following. As has “this is the best qually format ever don’t dare try to change it” in the comments.

    If you go back far enough then the qually format was completely different and everyone had plenty of time to set a lap, these days you have 2 attempts per session more or less, including time for last minute changes. If you get impeded on one, then there’s an yellow flag in one of your sectors you don’t even get to set a representative time. Good reason for complaining.

  3. Lets not forget that the motivation for the current qualifying format is to create advertising revenue in an easily digestible, action filled hour of television. And to create aberrations, otherwise you could easily just line them up on championship points order, or by any method of drawing of the lots, like a non race before the race
    It used to (for me) be the time when we’d see the culmination of the best man and machine can do in a single lap around a circuit. Highly tuned ,insanely boosted engines that melted the pistons if used for more than a dozen laps, rubber that stuck like glue, fuel that would eat asphalt when spilled to the paddock. (I’m not suggesting any of that would be sustainable, but it was entertaining)
    The current formula doesn’t even allow a different engine map for quali

  4. I thought Lando was holding an upside down steering wheel initially in Max’s post. I think it’s his backpack straps and he’s holding a phone, anyway they look like they’re in a slightly less than premium brand washing powder advert.

  5. Avoiding curb-riding is indeed more critical with the present cars.

    Baku City Circuit is among my favorites, so I’d be happy with the Azerbaijan GP continuation.

    Max’s Insta post would work for Caption Competition.

    COTD is fully spot-on.

  6. Can’t believe Rosberg is a querdenker. But I have them in my family too and it’s always surprising to hear all of the Facebook and YT based “reasons” the vaccine is actually dangerous.

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