Canada

An Island Circuit and a Maple Kitchen

Canada has raced at Montreal's island circuit since 1978, and its cooking blends Indigenous foods with the traditions of nearly every place its people came from.

Canada joined the World Championship in 1967 at Mosport, now Canadian Tire Motorsport Park, and in those early years the race was shared with Circuit Mont Tremblant in Quebec. In 1978 it moved to an island circuit in Montreal, and Gilles Villeneuve, with a fine sense of occasion, won the first race there. The track has carried his name since 1982. Our records count 55 Canadian Grands Prix from 1967 to 2026, 45 of them in Montreal.

Gilles Villeneuve won 6 Grands Prix, and his son Jacques Villeneuve became Canada's world champion in 1997, finishing with 11 wins. Lance Stroll and Nicholas Latifi have carried the flag in the modern era, and Walter Wolf Racing, a Canadian team in our records, won 3 races.

Canadian cooking is best explored region by region. Its oldest layer is Indigenous: maple syrup, bannock, pemmican, bison and deer. French and British settlers adapted their own traditions to a hard climate, which is why the cooking of Quebec and Acadia stands so clearly apart from that of Ontario or Newfoundland. Later arrivals from Central and Eastern Europe, South and East Asia and the Caribbean added chapters of their own, so pierogi on the Prairies and Montreal bagels belong to the national story as naturally as salmon from British Columbia or lobster from the Maritimes.

Canadians value good local ingredients and like to name them by place, from Malpeque oysters to Alberta beef. For a race weekend in Montreal, begin with something from Quebec and end with a tray of butter tarts. The plural is deliberate.

A taste of Canada

Circuits

Drivers

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