Thursday's press conference in Montreal gave us 2 Ferrari stories worth sitting with.

Charles Leclerc put the ADUO front and centre of his technical assessment heading into the Canadian weekend. The ADUO refers to one of the active aerodynamic systems sitting at the core of the 2026 regulations — one that Ferrari are still working to unlock at full potential. Leclerc's message was measured: the Italian-language AutoRacer framing has him fairly confident it will help close the gap to Mercedes and Red Bull-Ford, while the Motorsport.com version captures the honest qualifier underneath — "if we have it, it will help, but I don't know if it will be enough to close the gap to Mercedes." Both readings are probably true simultaneously. He's not overselling a fix, he's describing a development lever. And it fits the picture we already have: the Spain package is where Ferrari are concentrating their push, and the ADUO work is part of that same trajectory. The gap to the silver cars on race pace has been real enough that Leclerc isn't pretending otherwise.

Hamilton had a busier Thursday — he was essentially doing damage control on 2 separate fronts in one sitting. The simulator story first: somewhere between something he actually said and the resulting headlines, the narrative calcified into "Hamilton will never use the simulator again." He pushed back clearly: "I never said I wouldn't use it anymore." Fine, noted. More substantively, retirement talk got the same clean-hands treatment — "I have a contract, I'll be here for a good while yet." No wriggle room in that. Then the tone shifted into something warmer. Hamilton got reflective about what the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve actually means to him: 7 wins here, including the very first of his career back in 2007. That's not a number he was hiding — the affection for this track was visible, and you got the sense of a driver who, whatever the circus around him, is still fully present in what he's doing.