Canada 2011: Records that may never be broken

The race of the century? A lot of people would certainly agree with that statement, none more so than Jenson Button, who triumphed on that day in Montreal after one of the craziest days of his life.

The 2011 Canadian Grand Prix holds a number of records for a Grand Prix: It stands as the longest race in Formula 1 history with a total time of 4 hours, four minutes, and 39 seconds; It had the highest number of safety car deployments with six appearances; Button set the record for the lowest average speed for the race winner at 74.864 km/h (46.518 mph); and the Brit also completed the most pit stops completed by the winner of a Grand Prix.

Lap 8: Puncture after contact with teammate Lewis Hamilton

Lap 13: Drive-through penalty for speeding behind the safety car

Lap 19: Change from intermediate tyres to wet tyres

Lap 35: Change from wet tyres to intermediate tyres

Lap 37: Puncture after contact with the Ferrari of Fernando Alonso

Lap 51: Change from intermediate tyres to slick tyres

Six journeys through the pits and Button still came out on top, having completed a last-lap pass for the lead on the Red Bull of Sebastian Vettel, the German being pressured into a mistake on the drying track.

Refuelling had already been banned by 2011 so long gone were the days when drivers would usually complete two, or even three stops en route to the chequered flag. Michael Schumacher even took victory on a four-stop strategy at the 2004 French Grand Prix!

But in more recent times Grands Prix have become less about pit stops and more about tyre preservation and elongating stints as long as possible to ensure less pit stops. The Monaco Grand Prix in 2025 even forced a two-stop race by mandating that all three tyre compounds must be used, but that created its own set of problems.

For this reason, it seems like an incredibly long shot that the record for most pit stops by a race winner will ever be broken. Never say never though...

Winning a Formula 1 race at an average speed of 74.864 km/h (46.518 mph) seems incredibly pedestrian for the fastest cars in the world. I'm sure I could lap my 1.2-litre Skoda around Brands Hatch at a higher average speed than that, but such was the unpredictability that day, anything seemed possible.

Given that we are now dealing with the fastest speeds ever seen in Formula 1, you'd have to think we would need an equally crazy, or more crazy, race to occur to see this particular record ever be broken.

Six appearances by the safety car, to me anyway, seems to be the most likely of these records to be beaten.

Of course, a total of six appearances is still a lot even for modern races, but all it could take is one race with a handful of rain showers, drivers being caught out and crashing, and this tally could be broken.

To finish, a total race time of 4 hours, four minutes, and 39 seconds is a record that might never be beaten. To quote the regulations, a Grand Prix must be completed in a maximum of two hours (and allowance for completing the final lap), within a four-hour window. The 2011 Canadian Grand Prix pushed that regulation to its limit as it came in at just over the four-hour mark.

Of course, the race itself didn't total four hours; the official time included the red flag stoppage on lap 26, a stoppage that lasted over two hours, but for me there are two main reasons why this record might never be broken.

Firstly, the cars are so reliable these days that mechanical problems aren't as commonplace as in previous seasons, so fewer interventions of safety cars are red flags are needed in comparison to older days. Secondly, the race stewards seem to favour Virtual Safety Car periods over full safety cars or red flags these days. Not to say they never happen, but one does gets the impression that Race Direction prefers to keep the flow of the race going, meaning there are only red flag stoppages if absolutely necessary.

Once in a while, we get a crazy, memorable race that goes down in the annals of history and is talked about for many, many years to come. The 1982 Monaco Grand Prix, the 1991 Australian Grand Prix, the 1998 Belgian Grand Prix, the 2008 Brazilian Grand Prix, just to name a few.

The 2011 Canadian Grand Prix? Quite possibly the most memorable of the lot and one that is referenced multiple times in the record books for Formula 1. Will these records ever be broken? Perhaps. Perhaps not. To quote the late, great Murray Walker: "Anything can happen in Formula 1, and it usually does."

📸 Image credit: F1