Sunday's Canadian Grand Prix will not be a normal race weekend in Montreal. The forecast for race day is unanimous across the weather services Racing News365 sampled: steady, light rain across the entire afternoon, with track temperatures projected as low as 12 degrees Celsius and a feels-like figure of around 8 to 9 degrees with the wind chill. It will be one of the coldest grands prix on the calendar in years.
It will also be one of the most uncertain.
These 2026 cars, with their reworked aerodynamics and new energy deployment regulations, have barely turned a lap in real wet conditions. Only a small handful of drivers have any meaningful wet-tyre running this season. Racing Bulls did dedicated wet-weather work at Suzuka pre-season. Pierre Gasly recently completed some wet running for Alpine. Almost everyone else is walking in cold.
Gasly, who has experienced the cars in the rain, did not soften his warning when asked about it at Thursday's FIA press conference. "You guys are going to be in for a shock," he told the room.
"It could turn the entire race into a bit of a lottery into chaos," Piastri said, according to Racing News365's post-qualifying analysis. The car, the tyres and the temperatures, he argued, all add up to a situation the grid is genuinely walking into blind.
The tyre situation is its own problem. Pirelli's 2026 intermediate compound has been flagged repeatedly through the weekend as not being suited to the conditions Montreal will throw at it on Sunday. The level of rainfall forecast is firmly in the intermediate window. The drivers' reservations about the tyre suggest some will reach for the full wet anyway. Where that line gets drawn — and which teams call it correctly — will likely decide the result.
"Are the drivers going to have to turn to wet weather tyres when ordinarily for the level of rainfall that will be occurring throughout Sunday, you would use the intermediates?" Racing News365's Ian Parks said. "The other big concern is the power units as well. How are the power units going to hold up with these conditions?"
The 2026 power units, with their increased reliance on electrical deployment, are sensitive to the kind of rolling, low-grip running a wet race produces. Drivers will be lifting more, deploying less consistently, and asking the systems to manage temperatures they have rarely been pushed through in this configuration.
George Russell starts from pole. Andrea Kimi Antonelli is second. Mercedes have already conceded that their setup direction was tilted towards the wet — more rear downforce than they would normally run at Montreal. That decision should help them on Sunday, but only if the rain shows up consistently. A drying line halfway through, on a track Mercedes have set up for the rain, swings the advantage to whichever team has gambled less.
If there is a name worth keeping an eye on outside the front rows, the Racing News365 hosts settled on the obvious one: Max Verstappen, sixth on the grid, but with a record in proper wet conditions almost no one else can match.
"If there's one driver you would back to go well in wet weather, is Max Verstappen," Parks said.
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*Originally published on [News Formula](https://newsformula.one/article/canada-wet-race-lottery-gasly-piastri-pirelli-intermediates-warning-2026). Visit for full coverage.*
