"It was good," insists Mercedes boss Toto Wolff of Montreal battle that had Kimi Antonelli seething.

Finally the gloves were off. Kimi Antonelli has taken three successive poles - his first - and converted them all into victories, thereby outshining his teammate and essentially the German team's number one.

Having twice gone off as he battled George Russell, Antonelli made his feelings crystal clear, causing Toto Wolff to take to the radio to warn him to focus on the race and stop moaning.

At the end of the Sprint, it was clear that Antonelli was still unhappy, while Russell was clearly relieved to have reasserted himself.

Despite the best efforts of Stefano Domenicali and others, many see F1 2026 as a let-down and the racing artificial, but now we appeared to have a genuine intra-team fight on our hands, conjuring up memories of Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg.

"It was good," said Wolff, in a bid to calm broadcasters' excitement at the prospect. "Good cinema, and the race was good as well," he added.

"For us, actually a very good learning experience about how we want to do things, or also how we don't want to do them.

"You can see how quickly you give away an advantage when you simply fight each other too hard," he continued. "And there are always two people involved.

"So now we'll discuss it, what can we learn from it, what conclusions can we draw, so that in the future we simply avoid these situations.

"If it's not George but another driver, then you also wouldn't expect him to drive alongside you there and invite you through. And I think that's the consequence. Team-mates can overtake each other in moments like these. But probably defending that hard, the way it happens when it's about the championship, you can't expect someone to just open the door anymore."

Referring to Antonelli's obvious anger, the Austrian said: "You can't expect to have a lion in the car and a puppy outside of it."

"I didn't really make a lot of it to be honest," Russell subsequently told Sky of the initial incident, which Antonelli had described as being "very naughty". "It's always a challenging corner to overtake on the outside of.

"It's always one of those that when you've got one corner leading into the next, it's very easy for the outside driver to break much later than you would do ordinarily," he added. "But the inside driver is only going one direction. I was just taking my normal line into Turn 2. And that's all I say really."

"Yeah, for sure the win. It cost," said Antonelli. "I think the pace was very strong. But of course it's very hard to say. But I feel like overall it was a hard battle.

"It felt a bit unfair in the moment I am not going to lie, but I think also emotion runs very high and it's difficult for us to stay very cool because when you go on track, I always try to give my best and I wasn't trying to settle for second.

"So yeah, it was a hard battle but now for sure we'll clarify with the team and then we'll focus on the qualifying."

"It's always been discussed in the years gone by," said Russell of such battles. "You race each other hard, but fair. From my side there's never ill intentions towards anything. But on the same note, I'm not just going to wave somebody by. We're both fighting for our championship, but as always, the team comes first. We'll both talk about it after for sure. But for me I've got the peace of mind that it wasn't investigated and if the FIA think it was fine, then that's enough.

"It is inevitable that if you got two cars, qualifying one-two most weeks, you're going to have some close racing," he insisted. "But we do respect one another. It is not the intention to ever collide, and the fact that we're both here standing and we finished one-three, could have been one-two, I don't think it's a big deal."

"There's a framework that we want to establish," said Wolff, "and I'd rather have it in a Sprint race where it's not about a lot of points than in the main race."

Referring to Antonelli's reaction, he said: "We don't want to start with race five and then have headlines like Star Wars or this is escalating because it's not. It's in the emotion and he's a young driver. And I think George would have probably would have done the same. So we just need to see how we handle it."

Check out our Saturday gallery from Montreal here.