Mercedes returns as a frontrunner

What a difference a month makes. Mark Hughes takes us through the laps at Canada, Spain and Austria as a fourth team joins this season's winners list

- Mark Hughes

As McLaren and Lando Norris established themselves at the front, apparently ready at any track to challenge Red Bull and Max Verstappen on raw performance, so the differences in detail began to assume magnified significance. But for two split-second moments in Canada and Spain respectively Norris could – and should – have won consecutive grands prix. You cannot give such things away to Verstappen and Red Bull and go unpunished, even if theirs is no longer a dominant car, merely a very competitive one. Once Norris and McLaren got those details right, what then? There still remained the immovable object of Max Verstappen in a wheel-to-wheel contest. How might that pan out?

At the end of this three-race run, Verstappen had won seven of the season’s 11 races to date. But not since China in Round 4 has Red Bull had the sort of advantage over the field which was routine last year.

Coming off the back of the uneventful Monaco race, Canada was a welcome thrilling three-way scrap between Verstappen, Norris and George Russell’s Mercedes, livened up immensely by the weather.

The first two stints of the race were run with almost everyone on intermediates. Although it was just a steady drizzle as the race started, the track was wet enough from a previous downpour that it was worth a gamble on full wets for Haas. Kevin Magnussen rose as high as fourth in the early stages – “It was great. It was as if I was driving a Red Bull,” – before the wets overheated and his cameo was over. George Russell had set pole for Mercedes as the car seemed to be responding well to its new front wing. He led the early stages of the race too, with Verstappen in his wheel tracks. The Red Bull had matched Russell’s pole to the thousandth but the Mercedes driver had set the time first and was now looking quite comfortable holding off the world champion.