Fred Vasseur is in careful expectation-management mode ahead of Montreal. Ferrari have 12 wins at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve — more than any other team on the current grid — but the team principal is flagging 2 specific factors that complicate the picture this weekend: cooler-than-usual ambient temperatures and the Sprint format. With only 1 hour of free practice before Sprint Qualifying kicks off on Friday afternoon, his message is essentially: very little margin to get things wrong.

The temperature concern is more than vague weather-watching. Ferrari have specifically identified brake temperature imbalance as the key technical risk at Montreal. The Circuit Gilles Villeneuve is a textbook stop-start layout — heavy braking zones into the chicanes, then full-throttle blasts down the pit straight — and in cool conditions, keeping the brakes in the right thermal window becomes genuinely difficult. If one corner of the car runs hotter than the others, you lose consistency and stability under braking. On a circuit where concrete barriers line the track at close range, that's not an abstract concern. The Sprint weekend structure makes it worse: there's no extended free practice session to fine-tune brake cooling ducts and balance before things start counting.

A new technical analysis comparing the SF-26 to the Haas VF-26 adds an important layer to the straight-line speed question that's been hovering over Ferrari since Miami. Despite sharing the same power unit and some technical DNA, the two cars build their performance in fundamentally different ways — and the analysis suggests the SF-26's drag penalty is a car-specific aerodynamic issue, not a consequence of the Ferrari engine. Haas extracts straight-line speed through different means. That matters because it shifts the problem away from the power unit and toward SF-26 aero philosophy: how much drag is the car carrying, and is that a deliberate downforce trade-off or an efficiency problem? Either way, it's a harder fix than swapping a component, which helps explain why the Spain update package is being treated as such a priority at Maranello.

Bottom line heading into the weekend: Ferrari need a clean Sprint execution, careful brake thermal management, and a circuit character that — historically, at least — tends to suit the Cavallino. The 12 wins on the trophy shelf are real. Whether the SF-26 can add to that tally in 2026 is the question Montreal is about to start answering.