RaceFans Round-up: F1 drivers will have to avoid Montreal’s kerbs in new cars

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 2019 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

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…