Montreal’s Electric Race Was a Scam. F1’s Is a Sales Pitch.

Formula E came to Montreal in 2017 with an electric mandate and left a corruption report. F1 returned in 2026 with the same pitch and better backers.

On May 24 Kimi Antonelli won the Canadian Grand Prix at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, extending his championship lead to forty-three points after Mercedes teammate George Russell retired with a power unit failure on lap thirty. Three hundred and sixty thousand people attended across the weekend. The circuit sits on Île Notre-Dame in the middle of the St. Lawrence River, named after a man who died in a car, and Formula 1 has been racing there for forty-five years.

The 2026 cars are different from any Formula 1 car that has raced in Montreal before. The new power unit regulations, which came into force this season, deliver roughly half their power electrically — a threefold increase in the electric motor’s output, from 120 kilowatts to 350, with the combustion engine’s fuel allowance cut accordingly. The cars run on advanced sustainable fuel. Audi, Ford through Red Bull Powertrains, and Honda have entered the manufacturer field under these rules. Formula 1 describes the package as road relevant, environmentally progressive, and commercially attractive to the automotive industry it is courting.

Nine years ago the same island hosted a different electric racing series with a nearly identical pitch. The result was a municipal corruption case and a $35 million bill.

The ePrix That Ate the Downtown

The Formula E Montreal ePrix ran on July 29 and 30, 2017, through the streets of the city’s east end, not on the island circuit. That was the point: Formula E runs street circuits to bring racing into urban centres, and former mayor Denis Coderre championed the event as a statement about Montreal’s commitment to sustainable energy and its position as a global city. He signed a contract for races in 2017, 2018 and 2019.

Twenty-five thousand tickets were sold. Organizers gave away twenty thousand more to fill seats. Street closures consumed much of the east end of downtown for weeks before and during the event. Businesses reported severe revenue losses. Traffic on race weekend was described by Montreal police as among the worst of the summer. The non-profit created to manage the event, Montréal, c’est électrique, owed creditors $6.2 million in unpaid bills and was $9.5 million into its line of credit on top of the city’s committed subsidy of $24 million over six years.

When Valérie Plante defeated Coderre in November 2017, her administration looked into the file. In December she announced the race was cancelled. A second edition, she said, would cost taxpayers between $30 million and $35 million. She called the first one a financial fiasco and said it was clear as of May 2017 — four months before the race — that the organization was headed there, and that the Coderre administration had been perfectly aware.

What the Inspector General Found

In May 2018 Montreal’s inspector general, Denis Gallant, published a forty-page report. Its conclusions were not ambiguous. Coderre had ignored repeated warnings from the city’s own legal department. The non-profit he created to collect government subsidies — Montréal, c’est électrique — was, in Gallant’s words, used as nothing more than a communication channel between the mayor’s office and Evenko, the private production company that ran the event. MCE was an empty shell. The city’s lawyers had explicitly told Coderre’s office the non-profit should not be used as a go-between with a private contractor. The warnings were ignored.

Gallant found that Coderre had approved the arrangement knowing it circumvented procurement rules — and that the structure was designed to funnel government subsidies that a direct city-to-Evenko contract would not have qualified for. Plante said in response that an elected official had decided to go against the law to get what he wanted, and that it was very, very serious. She did not rule out referring the file to UPAC, Quebec’s anti-corruption unit.

Formula E Operations sued the city for $33 million after Plante cancelled the remaining races. The lawsuit was later reduced to $16 million. In 2021 Montreal settled for $3 million. The suburbs whose tax revenue flowed to the city also ended up on the hook for a share of the costs, with at least one suburban mayor calling it unfair that his taxpayers were paying for a decision their municipality had no part in making.

What the 2026 Regulations Actually Are

The 2026 F1 power unit rules were built through a negotiation between the FIA and the manufacturers who were already in the sport, plus the ones the sport wanted to attract. The result is a package that reads as environmental progress and functions as industrial policy for the automotive sector.

The previous generation of hybrid units included a Motor Generator Unit-Heat, a heat-recovery system of considerable complexity and cost. It was also a technology with no direct road-car equivalent, which meant manufacturers developing it were doing work that had no commercial application outside the sport. The MGU-H was deleted from the 2026 regulations. In its place: a simpler system, a tripled electric motor output, and a fuel flow restriction that puts a ceiling on combustion power. The stated rationale was to lower the barrier to entry for new manufacturers.

Audi entered on those terms. So did Ford, in partnership with Red Bull Powertrains. Honda returned, now supplying Aston Martin. General Motors is set to join in 2029. Each of those manufacturers is engaged in a commercial transition toward electric road vehicles, and each now has a Formula 1 presence built on a regulatory framework that mirrors — and markets — that transition. The rules were designed to be attractive to them. They were.

Christian Horner, before he left Red Bull, called the resulting cars Frankenstein creations. The electric power is massive enough to drain the battery before the end of a straight if deployed fully, meaning drivers now manage energy the way Formula E drivers do — harvesting under braking, rationing deployment, making racing decisions based on electrical state rather than lap time alone. The engineering parallels to Formula E that several analysts have noted are not coincidental. The regulations moved Formula 1 toward Formula E’s design philosophy, with Formula 1’s budgets and broadcast reach attached.

Electrification Is Always for Someone

The Circuit Gilles Villeneuve has hosted the Canadian Grand Prix every year since 1978 with two exceptions, neither of them related to the event’s finances or its environmental credentials. Formula E ran on the streets of the city once, cost $35 million projected for a second year, and left a non-profit bankrupt, a mayor defeated, an inspector general’s report on circumvented procurement law, and a four-year lawsuit resolved for cents on the dollar.

The difference between the two is not the electric percentage. Formula E was fully electric. The 2026 F1 cars are half electric, running sustainable fuel through a combustion engine, and they are presented as the more credible commitment to the future. The difference is institutional scale, broadcaster reach, and whose commercial interests the regulatory framework advances. Formula E in Montreal advanced Coderre’s political interests and Evenko’s contract. The 2026 F1 regulations advance the road-car marketing strategies of Audi, Ford, Honda and GM.

Thirty-six thousand people watched the 2017 ePrix on a good count. Three hundred and sixty thousand came to the 2026 Grand Prix weekend. One of those events had a shell nonprofit and an inspector general’s report. The other has the parent company that just finished being bought for CAD $4.35 billion. The spectacle is larger. The logic is the same.

Sources

Montreal’s Electric Race Was a Scam. F1’s Is a Sales Pitch.

The ePrix That Ate the Downtown

What the Inspector General Found

What the 2026 Regulations Actually Are

Electrification Is Always for Someone

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