Without rain, Hamilton leads the final practice session before qualifying in Canada

But the one who didn’t do much anyway was Chinese driver Zhou Guanyu, who actually crashed on Friday and spun around, even touching the wall, after doing just four laps on Saturday, causing a red flag.

The Canadian Grand Prix already has its hurdles naturally – last year, Nico Hulkenberg had the second-best time in qualifying for Haas – and everyone’s far-from-ideal setup increases the chances of that happening again. Any mistake will be punished during what we saw in free practice: the 19 drivers who finished the session were divided into 1s5.

Red Bull has another challenging Grand Prix

Especially since the world leaders, Red Bull, are not enjoying a quiet weekend again. They ran some tests on Friday to try to understand how hard they would handle the barriers, something that appears to have become worse after the team put new parts on the car at Imola, but rain hampered that assessment.

It also didn’t help that Max Verstappen only completed four laps in the second free practice session due to a problem the team suspects was with the MGU-K, one of the energy recovery systems. Verstappen will use his third power unit this weekend, seeking maximum power on the Montreal straights. However, due to the problem, the team decided to use the old engine and took the new engine for inspection at the factory.