3 Hamilton bounces back to the podium
Lewis Hamilton has, for the most part, cut a disconsolate figure as Mercedes has taken its giant step backwards from serial winner to alsoran. After Baku, where Hamilton barely beat Pierre Gasly’s Alphatauri to fourth place and finished over 70s off victory, W13 suffered such severe bouncing questions were raised as to whether Lewis would even be physically fit enough to participate in Canada.
But Hamilton dispelled those notions and worked with his personal trainer, Angela Cullen, to get his back straightened out. He (ahem) ‘bounced’ back to form at the scene of his first grand prix victory – turning around a disastrous Friday, when he declared the car “undriveable”, to qualify fourth then finish on the podium for the first time since the Bahrain season-opener.
Hamilton’s pace in this race was sufficiently unnerving for Ferrari to elect to pit Sainz a second time lest he come under threat towards the end, and Hamilton can also take encouragement from out-pacing Mercedes team-mate George Russell by almost 0.3s per lap (on like-for-like tyres) during the final sprint to the finish.
“I wasn’t really lost,” said Hamilton of the revised floor and setup experiments that left him trailing Verstappen’s Red Bull by almost 1.3s after Friday practice. “It’s just we tried two different avenues and the avenue I was down was dreadful.
“The balance I had was neutral, super positive, so no rear end. And as soon as you apply one degree of turning, the rear end comes around. I was just fighting that constantly and it was very difficult to keep it out of the wall. That’s why
I didn’t finish my long run, because it was just undriveable in the setup window that we tried.
“So, we collated all the data and we made drastic changes to the setup. And it was much, much, much nicer – more in line with what we anticipated. I had a little, nice amount of understeer, better traction, not having those snaps. So, it was night and day difference. We still have bouncing, that’s not going away… [but] much better than Baku this weekend, with the suspension that we chose.”