» Canadian GP: Hamilton romps to Montreal win

Lucky number seven! Five years on from claiming his maiden Grand Prix win, Lewis Hamilton has claimed victory for the third time on the Circuit de Gilles Villeneuve to become the seventh different race-winner in the first seven races of the 2012 season.

Running on a two-stop strategy, the McLaren driver overtook Fernando Alonso’s one-stopping Ferrari in the closing stages of the race to claim the win, while Romain Grosjean took a career-best second and Sergio Pérez finished third as a gripless Alonso tumbled to fifth at the chequered flag.

Pole-sitter Sebastian Vettel finished fourth on the road, unable to quite replicate his Red Bull’s qualifying pace in race conditions, which were noticeably warmer than predicted.

As we had predicted in our Canadian Grand Prix preview, track conditions were to play a crucial role in determining which teams and drivers would shine and which wouldn’t. The warmer conditions played into the hands of Lotus and Sauber, while Mercedes and Ferrari found the temperatures less than ideal.

Vettel led an incident free run through the opening sequence of corners, which saw the grid largely get away in its qualifying order. He eased out an early lead from Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso, but he lost pace towards the end of his opening stint and found himself overtaken by the pair when he pitted first.

Hamilton peeled into the pits a lap later to get ahead of Vettel, while Alonso changed tyres a lap after that and emerged ahead of the lot of them. But his joy would prove short-lived as Hamilton breezed by into the lead with a straightforward move along the back straight, helped by a bit of KERS and DRS along the way.

Hamilton began to edge away before pitting for a second round of soft-compound tyres on Lap 49, while Alonso and Vettel opted to try and complete the race on a single stop.

On fresher rubber, Hamilton simply had too much pace, hunting down the pair and passing them both to claim the lead and a comfortable win, his third on Canadian soil.

Vettel gave up on trying to make a one-stop strategy work and pitted for a second time late in the race, leaving Alonso to try and limp towards a second-placed finish.

But the Spaniard was finding himself quickly caught by the fast-closing Grosjean (who stopped only two laps later than Alonso) and Pérez (who ran a 41-lap opening stint on Pirelli’s soft tyres before switching to the super-soft rubber). With a handful of laps to go, he was passed by both, before the freshly-shod Vettel also cruised by to snatch fourth place from him.

He only just managed to hold onto fifth from Nico Rosberg, and the ten points he earned would not be enough for him to retain his championship lead from the Monaco Grand Prix: he now sits second in the standings behind Hamilton, two points behind the Briton and one point ahead of third-placed Vettel.

Rosberg and Mark Webber finished sixth and seventh at the end of the race, with both electing to run two-stop strategies that ultimately saw them leapfrogged by the one-stopping Grosjean and Pérez.

The pair finished ahead of the sister Lotus and Sauber entries of Kimi Räikkönen and Kamui Kobayashi, who were both unable to make the most of their one-stop strategies after being bottled up in traffic in the early stages of the race.

Felipe Massa claimed the final point with tenth place, although he should have finished higher up the order. The Brazilian suffered a rather comical spin exiting Turn 1 early in the race, looping his Ferrari before rejoining mid-pack.

The race was a disaster for both Jenson Button and Michael Schumacher, with the former enduring another point-less race, while the latter suffered his fifth race retirement of the season.

Button was on the back foot from the get-go, losing a bundle of valuable practice time on Friday when his team discovered a gearbox issue in his McLaren. After scraping into the top-ten in qualifying, he then elected to clock his final qualifying lap on Pirelli’s soft tyres (everyone else ran super-softs), which put him out of sequence with the rest of the pack he was chasing.

His chassis set-up was clearly all at sea and he struggled to make their tyre compound work for him, progressively falling down the field to finish sixteenth.

Schumacher had much better pace, but hopes of claiming the first podium of his F1 comeback were delayed by yet another race when his Mercedes suffered a DRS failure, jamming his rear wing open and forcing him to retire just after mid-distance.

2012 Canadian Formula 1 Grand Prix – Final Classification (70 laps):

	Driver	Team	Laps	Result
1.	Lewis Hamilton	McLaren Mercedes MP4-27	70	1:32:29.586
2.	Romain Grosjean	Lotus F1 Renault E20	70	+ 2.513
3.	Sergio Pérez	Sauber Ferrari C31	70	+ 5.260
4.	Sebastian Vettel	Red Bull Racing Renault RB8	70	+ 7.295
5.	Fernando Alonso	Scuderia Ferrari F2012	70	+ 13.411
6.	Nico Rosberg	Mercedes AMG F1 W03	70	+ 13.842
7.	Mark Webber	Red Bull Racing Renault RB8	70	+ 15.085
8.	Kimi Räikkönen	Lotus F1 Renault E20	70	+ 15.567
9.	Kamui Kobayashi	Sauber Ferrari C31	70	+ 24.432
10.	Felipe Massa	Scuderia Ferrari F2012	70	+ 25.272
11.	Paul di Resta	Force India Mercedes VJM05	70	+ 37.693
12.	Nico Hülkenberg	Force India Mercedes VJM05	70	+ 46.236
13.	Pastor Maldonado	Williams Renault FW34	70	+ 47.052
14.	Daniel Ricciardo	Scuderia Toro Rosso Ferrari STR7	70	+ 1:04.475
15.	Jean-Éric Vergne	Scuderia Toro Rosso Ferrari STR7	69	1 lap behind
16.	Jenson Button	McLaren Mercedes MP4-27	69	1 lap behind
17.	Bruno Senna	Williams Renault FW34	69	1 lap behind
18.	Heikki Kovalainen	Caterham Renault CT01	69	1 lap behind
19.	Vitaly Petrov	Caterham Renault CT01	69	1 lap behind
20.	Charles Pic	Marussia Racing Cosworth MR01	67	3 laps behind
	NOT CLASSIFIED
DNF.	Timo Glock	Marussia Racing Cosworth MR01	56	Brakes
DNF.	Michael Schumacher	Mercedes AMG F1 W03	43	Rear Wing
DNF.	Pedro de la Rosa	HRTF1 Cosworth F112	24	Brakes
DNF.	Narain Karthikeyan	HRTF1 Cosworth F112	22	Brakes
	FASTEST LAP
	Felipe Massa	Scuderia Ferrari F2012	70	1:15.752