Grand Prix weekend - Montréal

After getting into following F1 for awhile now, one of our once in a lifetime experience trips was to go see a Grand Prix weekend live. Spurring this on as well was our track experience at Abu Dhabi and a bike tour in Singapore where we ended up riding part of the track there. Heading to the Canadian Grand Prix in Montréal wasn't that difficult of a trip. We thought getting tickets to the actual race weekend was also going to be a bit more difficult than it ended up being, but we found a good set of tickets and went all in with tickets for the entire weekend. 

We flew to Montréal one day before the weekend festivities started. Our flight arrived a bit later in the evening and we noticed the taxi line up was ridiculous so we made our way to try and catch an Uber instead. This line we discovered was just as ridiculous and after waiting for an hour we learned that the system was so overloaded that despite being in line and having a pick up code, the system was no longer working and no Ubers were arriving. We slowly started seeing others who hadn't waited for any length of time start catching their Ubers which really started to annoy those who had waited in the queue. Eventually we figured out that the system was starting to slowly accept new bookings but those of us in the queue were a bit screwed because our booking code was not working. We ended up heading back to the taxi queue which by the time we decided to shift over no longer had anyone waiting, but we had just wasted just over an hour of time waiting for Uber. Lesson learned.

We arrived at the Delta Montréal and got all checked in without any further issues. You could see the F1 atmosphere all throughout the city. Hotels and restaurants were all decorated for the event. When we got into our room we noticed two F1 welcome packages as well which included. a bag, seat cushion, key chain and a couple other trinkets. It was a nice and well thought out gift, especially the seat cushions. We had brought our own which was a good decision because sitting on the metal seats for hours would have felt horrible. While the Delta is an older hotel that could use a refresh, we did have a lovely, rather large room with balcony. It was conveniently located near the metro station that took us to the metro station to access the track grounds, and was also within close walking distance to McGill University, shopping and lots of restaurants. 

Montréal has a great food scene and we explored a few different places outside of the food options at the track. A couple of our favourites were Dunn's Famous - first opened in 1927 - this restaurant is known for its smoked meats and poutine, including more varieties of poutine than I ever knew existed. We shared an order of the General Tao poutine - which came with flavourful chicken tenders and was absolutely amazing, and the Louisiana soup - a cream of potato; and Poulet Rouge - a quick service customizable grilled chicken bowl restaurant- a very flavourable, and healthy option. The track also had some really good foot options including pulled pork poutine!! 

While we did explore Montréal a bit on foot and took in a Canadiens playoff game at a local pub with one of Z's cousins, the main attraction of this trip was race weekend. We went all in and got the full weekend pass along with one of the concert evenings as well. The overall atmosphere was electric, and you could just feel the excitement throughout the city, not only at the track. 

Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve is located on an island just off old town Montréal and best accessible by metro. Friday was practice day and while it felt busy with crowds of spectators, the crowds were nothing compared to Sunday race day. We took advantage of it not being overly busy to walk around the grounds and check out the various food options, the fan zone and other areas of the grounds around the track. Our seats were located in the Lance Stroll grand stand by the hairpin turn which provided for lots of exciting viewing as the drivers came full speed into the hairpin forcing a major slow down only to accelerate back out again. We got to see quiet a few great overturns here. I did at time feel like I was watching a tennis match though with my head going left to right to left again as they came through the hairpin. During the warm up to practice some of the drivers would slow right down in front of our grandstand so that we could take a proper picture of them in their cars, which I thought was pretty cool. Lewis Hamilton was the best at doing that. It was quite the exhilarating experience seeing and hearing the cars so close and smelling the burning rubber tyres. It's a bit indescribable but certainly was a once in a lifetime experience. 

As we had the three day pass, we could have spent morning to night at the track, but we did choose which events we attended. We made sure to obviously watch the main F1 practice, qualifying, sprint race and main race. We also watched the F1 academy race (women's racing) and the F2 race. Both having quite impressive and talented drivers. We wanted to make the most of the entire experience so we also decided to attend the Bryan Adams concert on the Saturday night. Opening for Bryan Adams was another Canadian musician, Dean Brody. Both were great and we thoroughly enjoyed the concert experience. 

Sunday race day was full of excitement and anticipation. The weather was looking a bit iffy with the threat of rain, which thankfully never turned into full on rain, but there was some drizzy at the start of the race which kept the race interesting as the track was a little wet. Everywhere was packed full of people (weekend attendance was 360,000), it was difficult to navigate the grounds anywhere quickly and there were line ups everywhere, you just had to force your way through at times. Mercedes started off strong with the front row 1/2 and the battle between Russell and Antonelli from the start was thrilling. They were intensely battling for first for the longest time until an engine failure took Russell out of the race and basically handed Antonelli the win with Hamilton and Verstappen rounding out the top three. It was insane race to watch, absolutely thrilling! It was an amazing weekend to remember and well worth the trip! 

To travel is to live... until next time. Life is good!