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The Races

The Races on and Kimmy Antonelli's fourth consecutive win in the Canadian Grand Prix gave him a 54-point championship lead after George Russell retired while leading. But did the

Mercedes intra-team battle step over the line, given Toto Wolfe has warned he may put the handbrake on?

I'm Ed Sture and joining me to look back on a weekend when the title battle came alive,

are John Noble and Josh Sotil. Well, Josh, let's get straight to it. We're only five races

into the season, but how significant a fork in the road do you think the Canadian Grand Prix was, given everything that happened over this weekend between those Mercedes drivers?

A hugely significant weekend, I think, right across the whole weekend. It felt like to me we started to see the shape of this title fight,

which right now is an intra-team fight between Kimmy Antonelli and George Russell. And we saw,

I think, George Russell in particular, trying to lay a marker down in that title fight. And we saw

that throughout the sprint race. We saw that throughout the Grand Prix with the way he raced antonelli antonelli who has taken this monumental leap from

first year to second year i think everybody has been a little bit surprised by it he is a huge threat to

what otherwise could have been a more straightforward route to a title for russell so I think this weekend we saw Russell getting his elbows out and making sure that Antonelli knows that it's not going to be easy to pass him ever.

And that Russell is going to make things very, very difficult on a weekend where maybe Antonelli was the quicker driver.

You know, Russell got his elbows out and did that to great effect in the sprint race

and was doing that to great effect on Sunday too, of course, before the unfortunate end.

So, yeah, I think this was definitely the weekend where the gloves came off.

It's so interesting, John, wasn't it?

Because we heard Toto Wolf on the radio intervening in the sprint race and trying to get Kami Antenalita quietened down a little bit with his radio comments.

We heard the drivers being told today, well, if you don't tidy it up, then we may have to call it off.

So there's all of these things going on, aren't there, in terms of the specter of team orders or being told not to race each other.

This becomes confirmation that we have a title fight and a potentially explosive title fight,

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