Montreal gave everyone the kind of tyre call that looks genius or ridiculous depending on which way the drizzle drifts five minutes later. On Sunday, it drifted away — and Max Verstappen didn’t need a second invitation to point out who’d guessed wrong.
The Canadian Grand Prix had been framed all morning by a stubbornly vague forecast and a track that never quite declared itself. Earlier rain left patches of damp across the Gilles Villeneuve circuit, the sort that can lull you into thinking intermediates are the “safe” option even as a drying line is already trying to form. On the reconnaissance laps, plenty of drivers sampled the grip on inters, Red Bull included. But while Verstappen — and Isack Hadjar — ditched them before the formational lap, McLaren rolled the dice that the skies would reload.
They didn’t.
Lando Norris took the start on slicks and, in the brief chaos of the opening phase, even found himself at the head of the field. But it was a lead that came with an expiry date measured in corners, not laps. McLaren’s early-conditions read left Norris committed to an early stop, and Oscar Piastri was even more immediate about it. On the formation lap he reported he was “floating around” and warned staying on inters would be “a mistake”. He peeled in at the end of lap one for slicks; Norris followed a lap later.
Those were two positions Verstappen didn’t have to race for. He simply accepted them, and by the time the Grand Prix had properly settled into a rhythm, Red Bull had converted McLaren’s uncertainty into clean track and a podium trajectory. Verstappen ended up third — helped again later when George Russell retired while fighting Kimi Antonelli for the lead — and he couldn’t resist twisting the knife on the radio-room politics of it all.
“That was a great call,” Verstappen said, dripping appreciation. “I was like, ‘Thank you’.”
It landed because it was true, and because it spoke to the reality of modern wet-to-dry racing: you’re not just picking a tyre, you’re betting on how long Race Control’s procedures and the start sequence will keep that tyre alive. In this case, the shifting conditions were only half the story. The extra formation laps — the kind of operational wrinkle teams always insist they can absorb, right up until they can’t — effectively gave the circuit more time to dry while the intermediate runners were stuck generating heat in the wrong places.
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella pushed back on the idea that it was a reckless punt. His argument was that the decision window is brutally short — tyres are fitted only minutes before the start — and at that precise moment, McLaren believed the track was “greasy” and rain was still present.
“You have to consider that the tyres are fitted five minutes before the start,” Stella explained. “And that’s kind of seven minutes when we needed to operationally make a decision.
“In our view, the track was greasy… and it was raining. So we thought that at the time you have to make a decision as to what tyres, that was the right tyre for the moment.”
Where Stella’s frustration really sat was in how quickly the situation flipped — and how the extended pre-start sequence amplified it.
“After that, the rain very rapidly stopped, and also there was a double formation lap that took the best out of this decision,” he said. “Because I would have been pretty interested in seeing the cars with the dry tyres, had the race started at the time it should have started.”
From McLaren’s side, that’s a familiar kind of pain: a call made on the correct information at the correct time, torpedoed by how the minutes then unfold. From the outside, it also highlights the thin line between “proactive” and “overcommitted” when you’re trying to out-think a drying track. Once Piastri is telling you the car is floating and calling it a mistake before the lights have even gone out, you’re no longer debating strategy — you’re managing damage.
Verstappen, meanwhile, sounded almost surprised to be cashing in. He admitted he’d felt better about the car in Miami, and that Canada’s podium was built partly on others’ misfortune as much as Red Bull’s pace.
“To be honest, I was feeling better in Miami with the car, so I’m a little bit surprised with being on the podium here,” he said. “But you also have to look at it with George retiring, McLarens making a mess of the strategy. So, for me to be here, of course I’m very happy.
“We still did a good job. I think for us to have our first podium is just very positive… in quite tricky conditions.”
That last line matters. It’s easy to frame this as McLaren throwing away track position — and they did — but Red Bull still had to navigate a circuit that punishes impatience and rewards clarity. Verstappen’s weekend won’t go down as a dominant performance, yet opportunism is part of why he’s a constant in these situations: when a rival hands him momentum, he doesn’t fumble it.
For McLaren, the debate will roll on because the margins are always so fine in these calls. The inter start wasn’t indefensible; it was just unforgivingly exposed by a track that dried faster than expected and a start procedure that dragged on long enough to make the “right tyre for the moment” the wrong tyre for the race. In 2026, that’s often all it takes to turn a front-running Sunday into a damage-limitation exercise — and to give Verstappen a line he’ll happily repeat the next time someone else blinks first.
