George Russell believes his retirement from the Canadian Grand Prix was due to running in a DRS train and not his early clash with the unforgiving Montreal walls.

The Briton was running fourth, hard on the heels of his teammate and Fernando Alonso when he clouted the wall at the Turn 8/9 chicane, causing damage to his front wing.

The Briton was able to rejoin the race and had worked his way back up to eighth when he was ordered to retire.

Following his early encounter with the wall, Russell said his car felt "a bit bent" but still had pace, and when asked if he believed his retirement - which was brake related - was connected with the incident claimed he didn't believe this to be the case.

"I need to look into it with the team but I'm pretty sure it was just because I was in so much traffic," he said. "We weren't planning to be and the brakes weren't in the right spot for that.

"It was all quite sudden when it was too late," he added. "The thing with brakes is that once you go over a certain oxidation threshold, there's no recovering. It doesn't matter how much you nurse them. They're just on a rate you can't recover."

Asked about the original incident, he said: "I just went a bit wide into Turn 8. I knew I was going to hit the kerb, but I wasn't expecting the sausage kerb to have such a violent response. Next thing, I'm in the air. When I landed, I lost the rear and I was in the wall. It all happened really quite suddenly."

Despite the damage he was able to return to the pits, and was soon back on track.

"I was surprised that we managed to continue," he admitted. "I was very close to pulling up, it's a difficult pill to swallow. But that's how the sport should be. One small mistake and you should be punished for it.

"It didn't feel 100% perfect," he said of the car, "but it was good enough to drive. I think the rear toe was probably a little bit out.

"We could have finished home in P8 but we were in a lot of traffic and the pre-race predictions, obviously we weren't expecting to be in that position. Hence why we probably got the brakes in the wrong place.

"Sorry to the team," he concluded, "for sure there was P3 and P4 in the car for us both but positives to take away that the car was reasonably competitive."

Check out our Sunday gallery from Montreal here.