Prime Tire Newsletter | This is The Athletic’s F1 newsletter. Sign up here to receive Prime Tire directly in your inbox twice a week during the season and weekly in the offseason.Welcome back to Prime Tire, where today I’m looking forward to this weekend’s Canadian Grand Prix — always a highlight of the Formula 1 calendar.The three-week gap from Miami to now has a spring break-like feeling. It’s weird to think that had the main race day in Florida been washed out by severe thunderstorms, then there would have been just one sprint race in an eight-week run.Thankfully that didn’t happen, and now there’s more F1 action coming up, as well as plenty to digest from the paddock in recent days.I’m Alex, and Madeline Coleman will be along later.Canadian GP: This race matters for the Mercedes duoAfter writing that headline above, I can just hear Mercedes boss Toto Wolf: “We just really need to stay calm here.”Or: “All of us collectively that are close to him, we need to keep re-emphasizing and repeating the message. This is a long game, he has a killer of a teammate, who is extremely fast. The others are catching up in performance. And we want to play the long game.”Much of that familiar feeling is because it’s what I heard Wolff say in his post-race media briefing in the aftermath of Kimi Antonelli’s Miami victory — although he initially was asked about what the 19-year-old Italian worked on over the winter to be so good right now.But it’s also because Mercedes will no doubt again try to dim down narratives that others (including the media) want to highlight in this title battle.Let’s deal with the PR first.Yes, Montreal is just race five of 22 (or potentially 23, or maybe even 24). There’s a very long way to go in this championship. Although Antonelli seemed solid since his shaky start in Australia, he could crumble in exactly the same way Oscar Piastri did at McLaren last year, when Lando Norris continually kept himself within reach of his teammate.Right now, how similar the 2025 and 2026 seasons started — in terms of an intra-team title battle and how interlopers thrust themselves into each contest — stands out.