The statistical curiosity coming out of Montreal on Saturday: George Russell qualified ahead of Andrea Kimi Antonelli by 0.068 seconds for Sunday's Canadian Grand Prix. He had qualified ahead of Antonelli by 0.068 seconds for the sprint a day earlier. To the millisecond, the same gap, in the same Mercedes garage.
Russell's third consecutive pole at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve did not look like a clean one. He left Q3 without a banker time on his first run, dropping him to the bottom of the top ten. Mercedes had fuelled the car heavily enough that he could be sent out first on the road for the final run, and he delivered a lap on the very last set of soft tyres anyone touched.
"As the last man across the line, last on the road, he absolutely blitzed it," Racing News365 lead editor Ian Parks said in the channel's post-qualifying debrief. "But delivered a superb performance to again knock Kimi Antonelli off top spot."
The lap itself was decided in one place.
Peter Windsor, breaking down the sectors on his own channel, said Antonelli had been quicker in sectors one and three. The pole was found in sector two — and inside sector two, in the chicane that opens it.
Coming out of the previous corner, Antonelli was 1 to 2 km/h faster than Russell on the right-hand kink heading into the chicane. According to Windsor's read of the data, that extra speed cost him.
"Kimi being a little bit conservative, I think, on the lap," Windsor said. "But getting the car there and qualifying second, an excellent second. But George using his experience there to get the pole just by braking a tad later in what amounts to a 120, 123 km/h chicane."
Russell himself acknowledged after the session that Mercedes had run a setup tilted towards the wet weather forecast for Sunday. The front and rear of the car had not been in harmony on his first run. The second one fixed it.
The on-track stakes are obvious. Antonelli has won three of the last four grands prix. He leads the championship by 18 points after Russell beat him in the sprint earlier on Saturday. Russell needed Montreal, badly. He got it.
The grand prix itself, with steady rain forecast for the entirety of Sunday and feels-like temperatures around 8 degrees, is a separate question. Mercedes are set up for the wet. The 0.068-second gap that has chased the Mercedes pair across two sessions may not survive the rain.
