page_title: 2015 Formula One World Championship
section_title: European and Canadian rounds
hierarchical_section_title: 2015 Formula One World Championship / Season report / Championship / European and Canadian rounds
caption_attribution_description: English: The Start of the 2015 Spanish Grand Prix
context_page_description: The 2015 FIA Formula One World Championship was the 69th season of FIA Formula One motor racing. It featured the 2015 Formula One World Championship, a motor racing championship for Formula One cars, recognised by the sport's governing body, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, as the highest class of competition for open-wheel racing cars. Twenty-two drivers representing ten teams contested nineteen Grands Prix, starting in Australia on 15 March and ending in Abu Dhabi on 29 November as they competed for the World Drivers' and World Constructors' championships.
  Lewis Hamilton was the defending Drivers' Champion after securing his second title at the 2014 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. His team, Mercedes, began the season as the defending Constructors' Champion, having clinched its first championship title at the 2014 Russian Grand Prix.
  The calendar featured two significant changes from the 2014 season. The first was the return of the Mexican Grand Prix, held for the first time since 1992.
context_section_description: Mercedes arrived at Spain already with a comfortable lead. Lewis Hamilton had scored ninety-three points out of a possible one hundred, giving him a twenty-seven-point lead over his teammate Nico Rosberg entering the eight-race European portion of the season.
  Rosberg quickly cut into Hamilton's championship lead by securing victories in Spain (reducing his deficit to twenty points) and Monaco. The latter win was aided by the result of a costly miscalculation by the Mercedes team to pit Hamilton with a 19-second lead during a safety car period (that briefly saw the use of the "Virtual Safety Car" for the first time in F1's history) with 14 laps remaining. Rosberg and Sebastian Vettel did not make pit stops, allowing both to narrowly pass Hamilton by the pit lane exit. Racing resumed on lap seventy-one and Rosberg quickly pulled away, remaining in the lead till the chequered flag. Vettel held off Hamilton for second and third, respectively. As a result, Hamilton's lead over Rosberg in the Drivers' Championship was cut in half, to just ten points. Meanwhile, Button secured McLaren's first points of the season by finishing eighth. This left the Marussia drivers of Stevens and Merhi, along with the other McLaren driver, Fernando Alonso, as the only full-time drivers not to score a point after seven rounds.
  At the following Grands Prix in Canada, Austria, and Britain, Mercedes put to rest the criticism following the result in Monaco through finishing first and second in the next three races, extending their championship lead to 160 points over Ferrari. Williams collected their first two podiums of the season in the form of third-place results by Valtteri Bottas in Canada and Felipe Massa in Austria, while Ferrari lost ground to Mercedes following a retirement in Austria and an eighth-place finish in Britain by Räikkönen. Other power unit manufacturers continued to struggle, with a Renault-powered car finishing in the top five only once, in Monaco, indicating their continued lack of power. Honda continued to have reliability issues and, up to the British Grand Prix, suffered nine retirements and two failures to start due to power unit problems, translating to only seven overall finishes out of 18 possible results.
  The Drivers' Championship remained closely contested between leader Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg, with the gap between them never larger than twenty-eight points after Hamilton's victory in round eleven in Belgium. The two would trade victories between rounds six and nine, closing the gap to as little as ten points. Sebastian Vettel, who at one time was within three points of the lead, after his victory in Malaysia, and who was the only non-Mercedes winner after eleven rounds, could not overcome team errors in Canada and Austria, and fell fifty-nine points off the pace of Hamilton after round nine. He rebounded in Hungary by winning his second race of the season, reducing the gap to Hamilton to forty-two points in the process, but fell out of a point-scoring position in Belgium after a tyre failure on the penultimate lap, dropping him to sixty-seven points behind the leader.
  Hamilton closed out the European portion of the season with his seventh victory of the season in Italy. With Rosberg's retirement at the event, Hamilton entered the closing rounds of the season with a lead of fifty-three points over his teammate in the Drivers' Championship standings, the largest gap of the season at that point, while Vettel sat a further twenty-one points behind. Hamilton's tenth pole position in Belgium assured him of victory in the FIA Pole Trophy, the award for the driver who achieves the most pole positions during the season. Mercedes had built up a 181-point lead over Ferrari in the Constructors' Championship, with Williams in third, 263 points behind the leaders. After twelve rounds, half of the teams had been represented on the podium, while nine out of ten had scored points.
caption: Nico Rosberg leads the field on the opening lap of the Spanish Grand Prix. He would go on to win the race.
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