Canadian Grand Prix 2027. The circuit is on an island. Your car cannot follow you onto it.

Circuit Gilles Villeneuve sits on Ile Notre-Dame, an island built in the St Lawrence for Expo 67, alongside the rowing basin and the casino. It is barely three kilometres from the middle of Montreal, which is why the race has a reputation as the friendliest on the calendar. But the island is reached by two road bridges and the yellow metro line, and on a race weekend the roads are given over to accredited traffic. There is no public parking on the island at all.

In practice that shapes the whole weekend. Your car takes you from the hotel to a drop off on the mainland, you cross by metro to Jean-Drapeau station or by the Old Port shuttle boat, and the car is waiting at the same point when you come back. It sounds like a compromise and it is not: the metro crossing takes minutes and the alternative, on a Sunday afternoon in May, is sitting on a bridge. What matters is agreeing the drop off and pick up point in advance and having a driver who stays there.

Montreal has three usable fields. Montreal Trudeau is the only airport on the island of Montreal itself and puts you closest to a downtown hotel, but it is a busy international airport and on a Grand Prix weekend the ramp and the handling are competitive. Saint-Hubert, across the river in Longueuil, is the region's business aviation base, with several private terminals and a scale of operation built for jet traffic rather than fitted around airline schedules. Mirabel, well to the north west, is the third option and the one that costs you road time.

London to Montreal is a long westbound sector of roughly seven to eight hours, comfortable nonstop for a long range aircraft. Book the departure slot at the same time as the arrival: Sunday evening after a Grand Prix is when every aircraft in eastern Canada wants to leave at once. We arrange the aircraft, the handling and the cars at both ends as one job. See private jet charter, heavy jets and how charter works.

The Monday immediately after the 2027 race, 24 May, is the Victoria Day holiday in Canada, known in Quebec as the Journee nationale des patriotes. That is worth knowing for two reasons. Hotels and restaurants treat the whole period as a long weekend, so rooms and tables for the Sunday night and Monday go earlier than the race weekend alone would suggest. And the roads out of the city on the Monday carry holiday traffic on top of race traffic.

It also makes the case for staying an extra night. A Monday morning departure from Saint-Hubert is calmer than a Sunday evening one in every way that matters, and the city is a pleasant place to be with the barriers coming down. Cars in Canada are arranged through operators we know, with one person at Odyssey responsible for the whole itinerary.