Sebastian Vettel has taken his 29th career victory at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal, and the first at the circuit for Red Bull Racing. Vettel used a two-stop strategy to win the race and extend his championship lead, starting on the P Zero Red supersoft tyre, before switching to the P Zero White medium and completing the race with a final stint on this tyre.
“It’s great to win today. I was pushing very hard, especially at the beginning of the race – I had a moment when I hit the wall, but I didn’t feel it; I was trying to get away from the field, as you don’t know what will happen towards the end. It turned out that we could control things in the later stages, but you don’t know that, so I was just trying to push all the time and stay in the rhythm. It was good to see that we were quick in all conditions this weekend and had speed in the race. We had average tyre wear, which hasn’t always been the case for us, so we have made a step forward there. It’s nice to win here, as it’s a very special race. Not just the track, but the whole city enjoys the race and it’s a nice atmosphere,” Vettel said.
Following wet conditions in qualifying, the race was entirely dry today. Even though they had a free choice of slick tyres with which to start the race, the top 10 all chose to begin on the supersoft. The softest tyre in Pirelli’s Formula One range proved to be up to a second faster than the medium with a rapid warm-up time, making it a key element of Vettel’s sprint strategy.
Force India’s Paul Di Resta was the highest-placed driver to try something different, having started from 17th on the grid with the medium tyre. The Englishman stopped just once after 56 laps on the medium compound to finish seventh. The Lotus of Romain Grosjean and the two Marussias were the only other cars to begin the race on the harder compound.
Having gathered very little experience of running on the slick compounds up to the race due to the wet weather, the teams had to adopt a flexible approach to their strategy today, with little information on relevant wear and degradation rates. As expected, both wear and degradation rates remained low.
Photography by Mark Thompson/Getty Images
