Bottas also made only one stop, which allowed him to hold onto third place.
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Team radio “Float like a butterfly sting like a bee”.
Two weeks after lucking into his first win of the season in Monaco, thanks to a Red Bull pitstop bungle, Hamilton provided further evidence that his campaign is fully back on track after a start plagued by misfortune.
Kimi Raikkonen was sixth in the provisional race results with Daniel Ricciardo seventh for Red Bull. They remain comfortably quicker than Force India, who retains a small margin of advantage on the likes of McLaren, Toro Rosso and Haas F1 by again getting a vehicle into Q3.
On a cloudy and cool day, with an air temperature of 15 degrees Celsius, and rain forecast, qualifying began with the two Mercedes and both Ferraris leading the way out of the pits for Q1. The air temperature was barely 12.
Vettel caught Hamilton sleeping at the start of the race as the Ferrari pilot passed the Briton around the inside of him and took the lead for a good portion of the race.
Hamilton clocked a 1 minute 12.812 second lap on his first run in the top-ten shootout, and although he failed to improve on his second go, so too did Rosberg, with the German locking up into Turn 1 and then aborting his lap.
In reality, it was Ferrari’s two-stop strategy which contributed most to Vettel’s defeat.
After his second stop, Vettel quickly cut Hamilton’s lead to under 7 seconds, setting up a nail-biting cat and mouse chase to the finish.
Vettel beat both Mercedes drivers off the line to lead in Montreal but soon sacrificed track position by pitting on lap 10 after the deployment of the Virtual Safety Car.
He was slightly ahead of the eventual victor when they got there but Hamilton didn’t leave him any room to make the turn and Rosberg wound up off the track after they banged wheels. On lap 56 Vettel straightlined the chicane for the second time, extending the gap again and ultimately signalling the end of his charge for victory.
For his part, Hamilton said it was just one of those things.
Indeed in the dry, the championship leader provided Hamilton with the sternest of tests.
Williams’ Felipe Massa pulled out after 37 laps.
Vettel had leapt into the lead with a sublime start from third on the grid and led Hamilton in the opening stages. Hamilton said he engaged the clutch and the auto didn’t react; Vettel said he “just went for it”.
After the race, Rosberg said he was “p****d off” that the move didn’t work in his favour and led to him dropping down the order to tenth, a position he had to fight back from, whilst a slow puncture and spin delayed his progress.
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By lap 57, Vettel was showing some stress, locking up and missing the final chicane — losing 1.4 seconds in the process — and then finding it more hard to catch the Englishman who enlarged his lead to 5.9 seconds with 10 laps remaining.
