The rain may have once again allowed Michael Schumacher to display his skills in the wet, but the Ferrari driver's emphatic win at the Canadian Grand Prix had more to do with David Coulthard than the rain-darkened skies.

The Scot was forced to serve a 10-second penalty because his crew, who had helped him get over a stall at the start of the warm-up lap, had not moved away from the car 15 seconds before the start. The punishment effectively ended his challenge.

Schumacher was left with an untroubled run to the chequered flag, followed by team-mate Rubens Barrichello and Benetton's Giancarlo Fisichella.

Jarno Trulli, secured a much-needed point for the troubled Irish outfit by finishing sixth, but the day had promised much more for the team. Heinz-Harald Frentzen held fifth on the starting grid after a comfortable qualifying performance on Saturday and Trulli, tucked in behind on row four, was seventh.

Frentzen made a confident start, but dropped to sixth after three laps. Holding station there, the German seemed to be playing a waiting game as the attrition rate grew, but then as Trulli climbed from ninth to join his team-mate in a Jordan procession, Frentzen began to slow, his lap times plummeting from the 1:20s into the 1:23s.

He allowed Trulli to slip through and gamely held off the challenge of the following Ricardo Zonta in the second BAR. It couldn't last forever, and eventually the Jordan number one pulled into the garage blaming a brake problem for his retirement.

"We had a brake problem but not the usual one," he said. "The pads and discs were all right but we lost pressure in the system and I had no rear brakes and I had to abandon the race. Up until it that was all under control."

Trulli, though, battled on through the rain to take sixth, despite surrendering the two-point finish to Verstappen.

Afterwards Eddie Jordan admitted that he was mystified by the team's under-performance. "I don't know what happened here," he said.

"Normally when it rains we're really on top of it and we have to ask Jarno what his problems were. The conditions caught a lot of people out but it was the same for everyone. Jarno did well to hold back a lot of very quick drivers behind him and he's developing into a very quick driver.

"It's not what we hoped for but we seem to be making good progress. It's only a matter of time before we get the new car developments and new engine developments. I'm reasonably upbeat about the remaining races in the season."

If Jordan had a difficult day, Eddie Irvine could lay claim to an almost impossible one. After the pleasure of scoring his first points of the season in Monaco two weeks ago yesterday the Irishman was visited by the pain of a start-grid stall.

He again suffered the clutch problem that has plagued the team since the beginning of the season and dropped to last after being wheeled back to the pit lane to start. He never recovered.

To compound his misery, after complaining of poor traction in the dry yesterday, the arrival of rain sent him into a number of lurid spins as the race went on. The Irishman eventually finished a disappointing 13th.