F1’s engine grid penalty system is archaic and needs changing

Formula 1 returned to Montreal for the first time in three years last weekend, but it was with regret that the sting of the Canadian Grand Prix was removed before the event got truly underway.

This was the weekend when Charles Leclerc’s recent reliability troubles – his catastrophic engine failures in Barcelona and Baku – caught up with him, his Ferrari condemned to a back-of-the-grid start at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve for taking a new power unit.

From the moment it was confirmed that car number 16 would be starting from the rear of the field, it was no longer a question of if Max Verstappen would win in Canada, but how.

In the event the process was more fascinating than first feared – especially after Verstappen had set pole position by more than six tenths in qualifying – as a late Safety Car left him vulnerable to Leclerc’s team-mate Carlos Sainz in the closing stages, yet there was a certain inevitability to the result as Verstappen’s claimed his sixth win in nine races in 2022.

And although F1 made a triumphant return to Canada, another event re-energised by the sport’s recent surge in popularity, there was a sense that Montreal – as a result of Leclerc’s absence from the front – was missing something, that the locals were being denied a taste of what has made F1 so enticing since its last visit in 2019.

Charles Leclerc's season so far in one image #F1 pic.twitter.com/StSaqArrtg

— PlanetF1 (@Planet_F1) June 21, 2022

Grid penalties for engine and gearbox changes are nothing new, of course, and a title was effectively decided by them as recently as 2005 when Kimi Raikkonen was unable to overhaul Renault’s Fernando Alonso in a fast-but-fragile McLaren-Mercedes.

Yet in Liberty-era F1, when so much emphasis is placed