Montreal storm catches up with Mercedes as Daniel Ricciardo takes his chance

The only thing calm about the Canadian GP was the formation lap which was taken in a very leisurely manner to save fuel on a track notoriously thirsty for whichever exotic mixture the fuel companies had bought to Canada in seach of a few more horsepower.

Finally we now had a car/driver combo which could live with Rosberg's impressive pace through the first two sectors and then punish the heavily down-on-power Mercedes on the main straight. The lead and victory would fall to the ever impressive and likeable Ricciardo as he became the fourth Aussie winner of a GP after Sir Jack Brabham, Alan Jones and Mark Webber, all by a driver who had never managed to score a point at this classic and 'old school' track Williams went from staring victory in the face to a destroyed car as Massa clipped the back of Perez on the final lap. They both impacted the tyre barrier at a vast rate of knots and stopped alarmingly quickly, which is always a worry not least for Massa after his past trials and tribulations with concussion. Thankfully they were both ok. Perez appeared to jink left and we already knew from radio transmissions that he was struggling on the brakes. It seems to me that Massa may have at the same time moved fractionally right too in the sweeping right hand approach to the left hander of T1. The Stewards have decided, with all the information available to them, that it was the fault of Perez and he will take a five place grid drop in Austria. Both teams and drivers are unhappy with each other. Williams say Force India should have retired the car, which doesn't seem correct given the pace they had, the resets they had effected, and the fact that their issues were probably less severe than the leading Rosberg. Massa says Perez was dangerous in moving left, Perez questions why Massa was so close when he had more space. I called it live as 'six of one and half a dozen of the other', an unfortunate 50/50 racing contact and I'll stick with that from what I've seen. When push came to shove it was Red Bull who seized the opportunity with two drivers on the podium. Vettel did a miraculous job to recognise and steer out of the path of the high speed sled of the damaged Williams of Massa to get the final podium spot after Rosberg's remarkable performance with no KERS power. Those Mercs were showing a clean pair of heels to the whole pack at greater than a second and a half per lap when Hamilton and Rosberg were in maximum attack mode before the problems began. They are massively fast but also clearly a little fragile. Ferrari moved the record tally on to 74 consecutive points finishes but this will be of no consolation. Despite upgrades and impressive early practice pace they were never in with a chance of stealing the crumbs from the Mercedes table, and Kimi Raikkonen had another one of his weird low speed throttle-on spins. Jenson Button was putting in yet another one of his late Montreal charges and passed both Alonso and Bottas in the closing stages before gaining two places with the Perez/Massa shunt. It was a fine drive. Once again Hamilton finds himself with a significant points deficit to haul back against Rosberg in brilliant form in the same car. He might just become one of the few fans of the double points extravaganza in Abu Dhabi at the end of the season. Meanwhile, we can be happy that Monteal has extended for a further 10 years. Hopefully they will upgrade the desperately out of date facilities but not spend a dollar on the challenging and unrelenting race track. MB