Russell and Antonelli tell Mercedes to trust them after Canadian GP tension

George Russell and Kimi Antonelli delivered a clear message to Mercedes after their wheel-to-wheel battles at the Canadian Grand Prix raised concerns inside the team: trust us to race each other. The pair’s clashes in Montreal — the first time they had fought directly as team-mates — prompted internal reviews and a meeting with team principal Toto Wolff after the sprint race.

Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin acknowledged the battles had occasionally crossed a line. “Most of it is absolutely fine,” he said on the team’s Nu Silver Arrows podcast. “There were a couple of points there where it got too close for comfort. There was one point where it looked like one could have ended up going into the back of the other, which we will do everything we can to try and avoid.”

Antonelli had grown frustrated during the sprint race with what he felt was overly robust defending from Russell, going as far as calling for a penalty and suggesting his team-mate had breached Mercedes’ internal rules of engagement. That friction led to a Saturday night sit-down with Wolff, but deputy team principal Bradley Lord described the outcome as constructive rather than confrontational.

“After the sprint, there was a sit down and a chat with Toto and the two drivers just talking about how the sprint had gone and how they wanted to race each other going forward,” Lord explained. “Kimi referred to it as a little bit like being called to the headmaster’s or the principal’s office. That was actually a very constructive and very amicable conversation, but the message from the drivers was really, really clear: ‘Trust us to race each other. That’s what you’ve hired us to do, and we can do it’.”

Shovlin echoed that the team’s preference is to stay out of the way when possible. “You always want to let the drivers race. If the team is doing a good job, you’ve had the right conversations beforehand, and you don’t have to interfere,” he said, adding that further discussions would take place ahead of the next round.

The dynamic carries added weight given Mercedes’ position in the 2026 championship. With the team consolidating its dominance at the front of the field, Russell and Antonelli are widely expected to contest the drivers’ title between themselves, making the management of their rivalry a central challenge for the season ahead.

Mercedes is also drawing on hard-won experience. The team endured a damaging and increasingly bitter internal war between Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg across the mid-2010s, and is clearly determined to get ahead of any similar tensions this time — encouraging both drivers to voice concerns openly rather than allowing frustration to quietly accumulate.