Wildlife chaos and a champion's curse hits new heights - Things you might've missed at the Canadian Grand Prix

Canadian Grand Prix

Wildlife chaos and a champion's curse hits new heights - Things you might've missed at the Canadian Grand Prix

The race felt quite dull...until suddenly it wasn't

Chris Deeley

Monday 16 June 2025 10:57 Updated: 13:29

Well that was eventful, wasn't it?

No, not the actual Canadian Grand Prix as a spectacle, that was...subpar. Just the bit where Lando Norris smashed into the back of his team-mate and title rival like a man trying to park a battleship in a compact car space.

F1 Results Today: McLaren team-mates COLLIDE to blow championship wide open at Canadian Grand Prix

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For all the absolutely nothing that felt like it happened for 65 of the 70 laps on Sunday, do spare a thought for today's desk editor Matt 'Matty Ice' 'Phil's Dad' 'Mathys Tel' 'Matthew Icicle' Hobkinson, who at time of writing (midnight, UK) still has five stewards' verdicts he has to stay up and wait for before he can log off. Five! How did five things happen!?

Speaking of five things that happened...hey, here's some you might've missed if you (understandably) snoozed off after 20 laps today.

Final Destination-level foreshadowing

It's so important for F1 teams to be prepared for more or less any eventuality that comes up. You hope you never go as deep as Plan Z, but it is your job to make sure everyone knows what's happening.

Thing is, when you radio into your driver asking if he wants to swap onto soft tyres 'if there's a late safety car' and then a couple of laps later...that same driver crashes to bring out a late safety car? It seems less like a smart precaution and more like whatever the in-team version of a commentator's curse is.

Animal lovers, look away now

Boy, it's been a bad month to be an animal at a racing circuit.

If you switched off after the race finished and didn't watch all the post-race interviews – why would you, when we'll pick the best bits out to read on GPFans?! – you still might not know why Lewis Hamilton's car was damaged for most of the race.

We'll spoil it for you: it's because a local groundhog was...more severely damaged. In fact, we hear that some of it flew so far that it's now part hedge-hog.

That incident came less than a day after a car being damaged at Le Mans when a rabbit failed to bunny hop over its front bumper, and just a week after NASCAR Cup Series star Ty Dillon splattered a sprinting squirrel coming into the pits in Michigan.

Oops.

MORE McLaren jinxing

Oh, sorry but we're going to have to come back to McLaren race radio. Norris was always going to be fighting an uphill battle to get a good result after starting seventh on the grid.

When his offset tyre strategy began to reach its critical phase, the Brit was told 'we need one of those amazing races from you today'. Running in fifth and crashing into his team-mate probably wasn't what they had in mind.

'Please watch our film'

If you were worried about the crowd down at the bottom hairpin in Montreal, don't be.

Yes, every time the TV director flipped to the fixed camera that pointed down the track, showing cars arriving at and leaving from the corner, you saw the exact same short clip from the F1 movie playing on the massive screen.

We promise, the crowd weren't seeing that. The crowd were seeing pictures from around the track, but the fixed camera allowed the producers to digitally overlay that ad for fans watching at home. This wasn't a Clockwork Orange situation, no Canadians were harmed in the process of this race.

Well, except that groundhog.

Rosberg curse hits new heights

You remember the Nico Rosberg curse? When it became A Thing that every time he posted a picture with/supporting someone before a race, something would go wrong with them?

The one-time world champion took that to a new level in Montreal, even though he courteously made sure his pre-race Instagram shot didn't have a single driver in it.

Instead, he was just on a bit of the track, with a little bit of the run to Turn 1 in shot. Yes, the exact same bit of track/wall that Lando Norris ended his race in. How does he do it?

McLaren Lando Norris Canadian Grand Prix