2016 F1 Round 7 Canadian Grand Prix – Hamilton beats Vettel to victory

Hamilton won the Canadian Grand Prix, completing 70 laps in 1:31:05.296 and finishing 5.011 seconds ahead of Vettel. Bottas took third, followed by Verstappen in fourth and Rosberg in fifth.

Archive photograph of the Williams team at an award ceremony during the 2016 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix at Yas Marina Circuit.

Vettel surged from third to first at the start, with Hamilton following him. Hamilton and Rosberg made contact at Turn 1, dropping Rosberg to ninth. Vettel then built a lead while Rosberg began his recovery.

Ferrari brought Vettel in for his first stop on lap 11 and fitted supersoft tyres. As the regulations required soft tyres to be used in the race, he still needed another stop. Vettel switched to softs on lap 37. Hamilton used a one-stop strategy and ultimately beat the two-stopping Vettel.

Bottas used Williams’s one-stop strategy to secure the team’s first podium of 2016. Red Bull stopped both Verstappen and Ricciardo twice, with Verstappen eventually fourth. Ricciardo’s second tyre change was slow, and Räikkönen later passed him.

Verstappen held off Rosberg on laps 63 and 64. At the final corner on the penultimate lap, Rosberg briefly moved up to fourth, then spun and lost the place back to Verstappen. He finished fifth, having earlier suffered a slow right-rear puncture.

Räikkönen was sixth, Ricciardo seventh and Hülkenberg eighth. Sainz climbed from twentieth on the grid to ninth, while Pérez took tenth and the final point. Pérez fought Alonso and Kvyat for position in the closing stages.

Button retired on lap 11 with a Honda engine failure. Palmer returned to the pits on lap 19 with a coolant leak, while Massa retired after entering the Williams pits on lap 38. In terms of completed laps, the three drivers recorded 9, 16 and 35 respectively.

Rosberg remained at the top of the drivers’ standings after the race, but his advantage over Hamilton had shrunk from 43 points to nine. Vettel was third on 78 points. In the constructors’ standings, Mercedes had 223 points, Ferrari 147 and Red Bull 130.