Mercedes-AMG Petronas driver Andrea Kimi Antonelli made it four wins in a row when he took the chequered flag at the 2026 Lenovo Canadian Grand Prix.
After another break in the calendar, the race in Montreal marked just the fifth grand prix of the season but also presented the chance for consecutive North American activations for teams, partners and the sport itself.
Here, Sector picks the four standout activations from across the weekend that demonstrated how partners are using F1 races to engage fans, tell new stories and showcase their brands.
American Express x Crescent Street
Maison Amex returned to Crescent Street for the Canadian Grand Prix, positioning itself as one of the more polished brand activations within the festival corridor that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors across the race weekend.
The activation offered American Express cardmembers a dedicated hospitality experience in the middle of the city’s busiest Grand Prix zone – elevated lounge space, curated food and beverage programming and exclusive content, sitting just steps from the open-air chaos of the street festival itself.
Maison Amex offered a premium escape that reinforced the brand’s positioning around access and exclusivity, it is the kind of activation that speaks directly to the F1 demographic – and to the commercial logic of deploying a premium card brand inside a mass-participation event.
Hot Wheels x F1
Mattel launched the most ambitious fan engagement campaign of the season during the Canadian Grand Prix weekend, with F1 President and Chief Executive Officer Stefano Domenicali among the judging panel for the Hot Wheels Tiniest Team Principal competition – a global search for the sport’s next generation of leaders.
The three winners will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to their home country’s Grand Prix, behind-the-scenes access to F1 and Hot Wheels, custom race gear and a visit to Hot Wheels headquarters in California to collaborate with designers on their own one-of-a-kind Hot Wheels F1 car. Alongside Domenicali, the panel includes 2009 world champion Jenson Button and Mattel’s own design leadership.
The campaign demonstrated how a long-standing F1 partner can use race week to launch something with genuine cultural traction – putting the sport’s most senior figures in service of a fan-facing initiative designed to grow the next generation of motorsport enthusiasts from the living room floor up.
Liquid I.V. x Crescent Street
McLaren Mastercard F1 Team partner Liquid I.V. took to the Crescent Street Grand Prix Festival with its Pit Stop Challenge, bringing one of the most participatory activations of the year to Montreal.
The timed hydration challenge has become a recognised fixture of the Crescent Street experience, with the brand building recognition through repetition in a setting that attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors across the race weekend.
The activation extended beyond the kiosk this year through a collaboration with Sports Club Atelier, the lifestyle brand founded by Lauren Kyle McDavid, producing an exclusive limited-edition collection of jackets and caps available only at the Crescent Street stand across the weekend.
New City Gas x Red Bull Racing
On Saturday night, Oracle Red Bull Racing sponsored the evening at New City Gas – one of Montreal’s largest supeclubs – with James Hype headlining alongside Dansyn and Stef Agostino, placing the team’s brand at the centre of one of the weekend’s most attended non-paddock moments.
The activation reflects something real about how F1 teams are thinking about city-level brand presence. A venue sponsorship reaches a younger, less curated audience than hospitality suites and generates earned social content rather than controlled brand moments.
For a team whose commercial identity has long been built around energy, lifestyle and youth culture, a Saturday night in Montreal is a natural extension of that positioning and is a further reminder that the F1 brand can activate effectively in environments far removed from the circuit.
Seen a specific activation you think we should cover? Let us know which one.
