F1 Paddock Notebook - Canadian GP Friday

- Friday in Canada saw a rare mistake by Lewis Hamilton in practice as he hit the wall exiting the Turn 8/9 chicane, minutes after the talk in the media centre was that “everything is so quiet that it’s almost as if something big is about to happen”. OK - maybe we all expected something bigger than that, but at least the second free practice gave hope that we might, actually, have a race...

- Hamilton called it an "innocent mistake", but it was costly for his day as he was unable to complete either a qualifying simulation or any race runs in FP2, ending the session sixth-fastest. He will now be reliant on teammate Valtteri Bottas' data heading into FP3 on Saturday.

- With the temperatures picking up day by day in Montreal over the weekend and a short lap, meaning drivers might choose to do two fast laps, putting heat into the tyres might not be as hard as in previous races in qualifying, but having the cars on track for longer might mean that traffic could be an issue. Ferrari drivers Charles Leclerc and Sebastian Vettel both set their fastest times of the session on their second push laps.

- However, that’s no good news for Romain Grosjean, who has been having issues with it this year. During FP1, he was complaining with a lot of colourful language to his race engineer Dominic Haines about the lack of information about the cars around him. This has been common this year, since Haines was promoted from being Romain’s performance engineer. Asked if the relationship needed some fine-tuning, Grosjean said it was already much better in FP2. “Maybe some coffee helped!”

- That wasn’t the only issue he had this Friday. Also in FP1, some paint was stuck in his front-right tyre, resulting in big vibrations for a couple of laps. Some teams do paint their own floor, but that’s not the case of Haas, so maybe it’s another sign of how much they had to rush with the new paddock construction. 

- The quote of the day, for better or worse, was Franz Tost’s reply to a question about how a small team like Toto Rosso would cope with a potentially bigger calendar, as team members and their families could suffer without the ability of rotating staff they way big teams would do. But Toro Rosso employees should not expect any mercy from their boss. “I don’t care about families”, he said.

- On a happier note, Mercedes agreed to take part in the new Netflix season and Toto Wolff explained the “real” reason behind it. “I was watching it on a plane and saw Guenther f****** Steiner in it, and I wanted to do the same!”

- At the time of writing, the incident between Lance Stroll and Romain Grosjean is being investigated by the stewards. Stroll appeared to squeeze Grosjean out at the final corner, forcing the Haas driver to take evasive action to avoid contact.

- Grosjean's teammate Kevin Magnussen is also under investigation for not following the race notes' directions about staying to the left of the bollard at the final chicane when missing the apex.

- Running resumes at 11am ET on Saturday in Montreal with FP3 (4pm BST).

Luke Smith contributed to this report.