Tim Goss: "The fifth race of the 2026 season takes F1 to the Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve in Canada with its superb setting on a semi-permanent track, on an island on the St. Lawrence river not far from the city of Montréal.

The circuit is characterised by some long, fast straights, heavy braking into low-speed corners and a difficult final chicane, where the challenge is to be able to ride the kerbs and retain enough control to avoid hitting the concrete 'Wall of Champions' on the exit. On top of this, wet weather is often thrown into the mix.

"The long straights of the circuit have traditionally led to teams choosing a lower downforce rear wing setting to shed drag and shift the priority towards maximising speed in a straight line. However, with the 2026 regulations, the use of the Straight-Mode active aerodynamic settings will drop the drag level significantly, and as a result we retain the standard rear wing level. This to some extent simplifies the engineering task and removes any difficult decisions on wing level, but with the complexities of matching chassis and power unit settings with different circuit characteristics, there is still much to do.

"The chance of the forecasted rain for Saturday and Sunday will introduce a new dimension for teams. We have a slight edge in this area, having run Wet and Inter tyres in a Pirelli tyre test session after the Japanese GP, and we will use this knowledge on wet weather tyre warm-up and balance to our advantage. The baseline car set-up focus for dry weather will be on good braking performance, stability on entry, good low-speed through corner balance, kerb riding and traction.

"Our race preparation has gone well since Miami. The engineers have worked through the data and we have completed good simulator sessions with the drivers, on both circuit familiarity, car set-up and race pace optimisation. We bring the next phase of our early-season aerodynamic upgrades, and we are confident that this will allow us to build on our performance to put us firmly into the mix for a points-scoring weekend. This race weekend in Canada also represents the first trackside race for our Technical Director Dan Fallows, after he joined the team in April."