Lewis Hamilton at the Canadian Grand Prix: first pole, first victory, total command of the race! Wonderful.
But what a bizarre race. Crashes, black-flagging, crashes, pit errors, crashes. Raikkonen and Alonso duking it out – that’s not unexpected, but they were fighting over 10th place! Alonso was completely out of form, making mistake after mistake and finally being beaten in a fair fight by Takuma Sato. There were four safety cars. Behind Hamilton, Heidfeld and Wurz came in second and third. And Kovalainen, after a horrendous practice and qualifying during which he wrecked the car, blew an engine, and then wrecked the car again, came through from dead last to finish fourth. Of the 22 starters, 8 retired and 2 were disqualified.
The biggest crash of the day was Robert Kubica‘s frightening 180 MPH barrel-roll, and the medical team seemed to take an age to get him out of his shattered car. However they took him to hospital in Montreal and (at this point) he seems to be awake and in stable condition with a broken leg.
As for Hamilton, in his first six Grands Prix he has finished 3rd, 2nd, 2nd, 2nd, 2nd, and 1st. Simply amazing.
UPDATE: As The English Guy points out, the frequent safety car periods mean that Hamilton’s final margin of victory (4.3 seconds) doesn’t reflect the extent of his domination. In addition, the new (U.S. style) safety car rules allow lapped traffic to overtake the safety car and rejoin at the back of the “train”. Without this, Hamilton would certainly have lapped most of the field – perhaps all of it.