Starting from his maiden pole position a year ago, the rookie Briton belied his inexperience to shrug off four safety-car periods amid the usual chaos of the Montreal race to take the checkered flag for the first time.
And coming off the back of his Monaco triumph last time out, Hamilton is focused on taking home another 10-point maximum haul in his McLaren on Sunday.
“We have good momentum right now and we are pushing to keep that going and to keep developing,” said the world championship leader.
“Last year in Canada was one of the biggest accomplishments of my life. To take my maiden pole and victory in F1 was incredible.
“It would be great to go back there and do the same.”
Lewis Hamilton is not stupid enough to believe that his dramatic win in Monaco last Sunday has made a repeat in Canada next weekend a formality. His drive, in the trickiest conditions imaginable, was world class, but Hamilton will be the first to accept that luck played a major part. He will also be aware that Ferrari would probably have won this race had all things been equal. Fortunately for Hamilton, things are rarely equal at Monaco. Particularly when it rains.
It takes confidence and self-control to immediately pick up rhythm and speed after a simple, but potentially devastating mistake. Hamilton’s coolness under pressure was not even affected by the frustration of seeing his comfortable lead reduced to nothing by another safety car period with 16 laps to go. Just to hammer the point home to the pursuing BMW of Robert Kubica, Hamilton immediately set his fastest lap of the race when battle resumed.
Nothing, it seemed, would deny the Englishman. It is true that he picked up a puncture on his slowing down lap, but this came from Hamilton driving off the racing line and collecting a fragment from someone’s broken wheel rim at the first corner. By then, he was past caring as he savoured a win he will treasure among the many that are bound to follow.
As Hamilton and McLaren review the Monaco race and assess their chances for Montreal, it will not have gone unnoticed that Ferrari made an impressive step forward on a circuit that, until last weekend, had been the Italian team’s bête noire. Felipe Massa’s pole position lap may yet go down as the best of the season. The statistics show that it had nothing to do with running a light load of fuel in order to win the most important pole of the season. Hamilton and Massa were due to stop on the same lap, which makes the McLaren’s qualifying shortfall a slight worry as it underlines Ferrari’s step forward on such a slow and twisting circuit.
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