To Formula 1 personnel, Montreal is a leafy place, bathed in summer sunshine. The long winters, with snow piled metres high and temperatures not passing zero for days on end are impossible to imagine – unless you venture down into the metro system, and glimpse the vast underground city to which the populace retreats when the mercury drops. There’s a lot going on beneath the surface in downtown Montreal – which is an apt metaphor for our weekend at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.

No city race is embraced quite so fully as the Canadian GP. Montreal is determined to make the most of the weekend, and thus the magnificent atmosphere out at the circuit migrates back into the city every evening. While all of downtown is busy, the organisers concentrate the party into various city blocks by the expedient of closing the roads and inviting everyone out onto the street. It always works brilliantly. Or, at least, it seems to: just about the only people not indulging in the festivities are the race crews.

F1 loves its old-school circuits – but isn’t so keen on its old-school facilities. The Circuit Gilles Villeneuve stepped up this year with a new pit-lane complex that made the working environment much easier – to everyone’s relief. While the front-of-house (i.e. the bit of the garage people can see, looking in from the pit-lane) is largely unchanged, the workshops behind, housing tyres, bodywork areas, gearbox, engine bays, and the portable lab is now in the building rather than housed in a series of tents on the tarmac. Happily, we still have the narrow, atmospheric paddock behind that.

We had one of the busiest Friday sessions of the year in Montreal. That was partly informed by the nature of the circuit and partly by a heavy programme of upgrades to test. For Montreal, the car goes back to the sort of aerodynamic set-up last used in Azerbaijan – but over the intervening month, things have progressed, so the bodywork and wings that ran in Baku get all sorts of updates borrowed from the high downforce evolutions that were used in Spain and Monaco. They all have to be tested, which meant a very busy Friday for the crew.

Honest self-analysis isn’t a common trait in young racing drivers but Lando Norris’ harshest critic is… Lando Norris. The Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, more than most, requires a series of value judgements on the part of the driver: how late or how early to brake, and how much kerb to run at the various chicanes. It’s a fine line, measured by very narrow margins. On his first visit, Lando felt that the perfect lap was eluding him. His team of engineers, on the other hand, were highly satisfied with both his underlying pace and the evolution of his lap-time across the weekend.

One third way through the season, the shape of the midfield is becoming clear, with everyone understanding their strengths and weaknesses, and planning strategies accordingly. With little to separate the teams on underlying competitiveness, individual track characteristics are playing a big part. For us, that means one week the focus might be on beating Toro Rosso; the next week it’s beating Haas. This week, Renault were the other team our strategists were most interested seeing lap times from.

After qualifying, Carlos and Lando were behind the Renaults – but confidence was still pretty high. Renault had faster one-lap pace – but Friday’s long runs were firmly in our favour. Sadly, it never got to play out. Lando’s race was curtailed by an early rear suspension failure (still being investigated), while Carlos had his afternoon compromised in bizarre fashion.

Carlos might have hoped to jump at least one of the Renaults by staying out longer on the Soft tyre – but instead he was forced to pit at the end of lap 3. A tear-off strip from a drivers’ visor had become lodged in one of his brake ducts, which was rapidly overheating. The crew removed the debris in excellent time – but it left Carlos to nurse the car through a 66-lap stint on a set of Hard tyres. A cooler day might have saved him – but it was warm. A VSC period would have helped – but this year Canada was unusually free of incident. Not a particularly lucky day for us.