It’s quite the season we’re having.
If you saw a George Russell-led Mercedes one-two finish coming before the start of the Belgian Grand Prix, you’re lying — especially if you also predicted Russell would be disqualified after the race.
Not even Mercedes saw this result on the cards. Certainly it didn’t see itself fielding Russell’s car underweight.
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Jackman sent FLYING in Piastri pit stop | 01:47
But with Lewis Hamilton inheriting the victory — and with Oscar Piastri moving up to second and Charles Leclerc taking third — the result for the sport is ultimately unchanged.
Mercedes has won three of the last four races. McLaren has won the balance.
Max Verstappen hasn’t won a race in four rounds, his longest winless streak since 2020, in the days before he was a world champion.
It’s not just the result of this race that no-one saw coming. The whole season has caught Formula 1 pleasantly by surprise.
With seven different winners from the last 12 rounds and tightening battles in both championships, the sport heads into the mid-season break eagerly anticipating its return in the Netherlands at the end of August.
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RUSSELL PROVES HE’S READY TO LEAD MERCEDES
Putting aside his disqualification, it’s not just that Russell would have won the race on an alternative strategy, nor is it that Russell would have won two of the last four grands prix that made this such a big weekend.
It’s the way the Briton would won it — totally different to what had been a growing list of near misses in recent years.
Russell had developed a reputation for overthinking and overdriving when rare shots at victory were on the cards.
The highest profile example was in Singapore last year, the only race Red Bull Racing couldn’t win. Pursuing the lead late, he binned his car in the final laps in a small but costly and silly error.
Less dramatically but equally expensive were his errors battling from pole in Canada this year, constantly chipping away at his own victory chances throughout the race.
It’s not that he was cracking under pressure; it was that he had a tendency almost to become overwhelmed by his chances, losing the cool composure he otherwise oozes lower down the field.
Not so in Belgium on Sunday.
While it’s true the race came to him, once it became clear he had a good chance of winning the race, he was flawless.
His management of that 34-lap final stint was without fault, and his was centimetre perfect in defending ahead of the faster Hamilton in the last handful of laps — and there’s no greater pressure cooker than a battle with the seven-time champion as he bears down on top spot.
“He’s very strong,” Mercedes boss Toto Wolff told Sky Sports. “The two of them today were so mature and so good.
“George is stepping up, and it’s good.”
It must be a relief for Wolff, who will almost certainly be relying on Russell to lead the team next year, doubly so given Mercedes is now eyeing at least regular wins, if not a title tilt, in the final year of these regulations.
BUT MERCEDES FUMBLES VICTORY WITH ‘GENUINE ERROR’
Russell’s joy was short-lived, with technical delegate Jo Bauer finding his car to be 1.5 kilograms underweight during post-race scrutineering.
The minimum car weight in Formula 1 is 798 kilograms without fuel and without the driver, though it does include tyres.
There were suggestions after the race that Russell’s long 34-lap stint meant his tyres had worn so badly over the stint that he’d fallen below the minimum weight.
The problem would have been exacerbated by a quirk of post-race protocols at Spa-Francorchamps. The circuit is so long that cars turn right immediately after the finishing line and enter pit lane backwards instead of completing the usual cool-down lap.
At other tracks drivers are instructed to “pick up rubber” on their cool-down laps, getting discarded tyre rubber and other debris stuck onto their tyres to guarantee they exceed the minimum weight.
The stewards didn’t conclude on a reason for the infringement but said Mercedes admitted it was a “genuine error” with “no mitigating circumstances”.
Whatever the case, breaches of the technical regulations attract automatic disqualifications.
The rough rule in Formula 1 is that every kilo of weight is worth around 0.03 seconds.
A weight advantage of 1.5 kilograms would equate to something in the realm of 0.045 seconds per lap as a rough calculation.
That number would be higher around a lap as long as Spa-Francorchamps, but even that low base number would equate to around two seconds of race time over 44 laps.
Russell beat Hamilton by 0.526 seconds and Piastri by 1.173 seconds.
It’s a crude calculation and might seem a trivially small advantage better punished with a softer penalty, but the technical regulations are the bedrock of the rules.
A car is either in compliance with the rules or it’s not. If it’s not, it can’t be classified and is disqualified.
This won’t have been a deliberate attempt to cheat. Weight is so easily checked and the gain in this case is tiny.
It should therefore take nothing away from Russell’s individual performance nor Mercedes’s return to form over this weekend.
But it’s certainly an embarrassing error for a frontrunner like Mercedes.
BUT MERCEDES STILL ON RIGHT TRACK AFTER SHOT IN THE DARK
Regardless of the disqualification, the performance was hugely buoying for Mercedes, which rediscovered its mojo in time to head into the mid-season break on a high.
Mercedes is the form team in Formula 1.
Its six-race run of podiums is bettered only by McLaren’s 10, but no team can match its three wins from the last four grands prix.
It would’ve been the highest scoring team over the last five grands prix, dating back to the beginning of the triple-header, had it not been for Russell’s penalty; it’s still a close second-best behind McLaren.
Points scored over last five rounds, frontrunners
1. McLaren: 154 points
2. Mercedes: 142 points
3. Red Bull Racing: 107 points
4. Ferrari: 93 points
Most remarkable about the one-two is that no-one saw it coming, and that’s because the team was so wayward on Friday.
At the time it appeared like another episode in Mercedes’s inconsistency, having brought a significant upgrade package to the car this weekend.
The team was so desperate that it took off its new floor on Saturday morning. It was a risk — not only did it mean Friday’s running was rendered largely meaningless, but Saturday’s wet weather meant there was no way for the team to validate the new set-up.
But the team backed itself and came up trumps.
“On Friday we were really not as competitive, so we were expecting in best case a podium, then the team did really work well overnight in Brackley, and the engineering here at the track took the right decision and the car was good on one stop and it was good on two stops,” Wolff told Sky Sports.
“Overnight Friday to Saturday [Andrew Shovlin], our chief engineer, said, ‘I think we’ve figured out what it is’, and the decision was good.”
Wolff revealed the update wasn’t to blame for Friday’s poor performance but that removing it revealed the true issue, suggesting there’ll be more performance to come at the next race after the mid-season break once the new parts go back on.
“I don’t think that the new floor was bad,” Wolff said. “To the contrary, what we realised overnight was that we tripped over a mechanical issue, and we sorted the mechanical issue and from then on the car was better.
“Definitely the new update is going to come on the car in Zandvoort. It wasn’t the issue on Friday.”
It sends Formula 1 heading into the break in a highly competitive situation, with Red Bull Racing, McLaren and now Mercedes regular victory contenders and Ferrari knocking on the door.
PÉREZ HEADS INTO BREAK ON A LOW
A crucial substory of the Belgian Grand Prix weekend was the fate of Sergio Pérez in the second Red Bull Racing seat.
The Mexican has been under increasing pressure ever since he signed a two-year contract extension in June, with his nosediving results leaving the team vulnerable to McLaren in the constructors championship.
Qualifying third in the wet on Saturday was a decent last-gasp argument — it was the closest he’d been to Verstappen in months, albeit the gap to the Dutchman by time was middling — but he desperately needed to convert.
He did not convert.
Starting from second on the grid, the Mexican sunk to eighth at the flag before Russell’s disqualification, last among the frontrunning drivers and a drop of six places.
He was more than 14 seconds behind Verstappen before he made his penultimate-lap stop for fresh tyres to set the fastest lap. That’s despite having started nine places ahead of the Dutchman.
McLaren was able to outscore Red Bull Racing by another nine points, reducing the deficit to 42 points with 10 rounds remaining, keeping it comfortably on a trajectory to take the lead in the title race.
“Sergio had the opportunity to take a good result from second place. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case,” Red Bull motorsport adviser Helmut Marko told Sky Sport in Germany. “Especially in the last stint, he completely collapsed.
“What looked so positive in qualifying unfortunately didn’t materialise in the race.
“Of course every result is [important] for Sergio, and eighth place from second on the grid is certainly not what we expected.”
Red Bull Racing will engage in talks on Monday after the race to discuss its options for Pérez, who is believed to be at risk of having his contract cancelled owing to his 100-plus-point deficit to Verstappen, triggering an exit clause.
Marko said it wouldn’t just be saving the 2024 title being discussed but also the team’s plan for next season, when competition is expected to be close from the first round.
“For us the situation is such that we will also go through the overall situation for 2025,” he said. “We have a number of drivers and we have a concept.”
Red Bull Racing’s choices to replace Pérez are thought to be between Daniel Ricciardo and Liam Lawson. A private RB filming day in Imola later this week had been billed a shootout for the seat.
Ricciardo ultimately nabbed him the final point after two short opening stints undercut him into the top 10.
The Australian told Sky Sports he heads into the break in a positive mood.
“I think, in short, from Montreal I had some work to do,” he said. “We picked it up.
I’d say Silverstone was maybe the only outlier, otherwise I’ve been really happy with how things have gone.
“Of course I would’ve loved the whole season to have been awesome, but if it starts slow, try to finish strong, and that’s where I’m at coming into the break — much more fulfilled, content.
It’s unclear whether Red Bull Racing will commit to ending Pérez’s inconsistent tenure with the team and, if it does so, whether it will move during the break.
But it’s clear patience is running thinner than ever and that Ricciardo is on the right trajectory at the right time.
PIASTRI PODIUM CLOSES TITLE GAP AS McLAREN POWER BALANCE SHIFTS
The flip side of Verstappen’s growing winless run is McLaren’s growing strength.
McLaren gambled on taking a dry-weather set-up into qualifying. Its time attacks looked modest, but the decision paid off, with Oscar Piastri in particular one of the race’s standout performers.
Fresh off his first grand prix victory last weekend, the Aussie was the fastest driver on track at several moments of the race. Had McLaren cottoned on to the possibility of running a one-stop strategy, he would have easily had the pace to defeat both Mercedes drivers — not that the team can be blamed, with almost every other constructor passing up the strategy as being too risky.
The one-stop strategy was so powerful because it prevented drivers from getting stuck in dirty air, which was especially costly on a relatively warm day.
It was easier to get stuck in dirty air this year too given the DRS zone down the Kemmel straight was shorter than in previous years, making overtaking more difficult than expected.
“This meant the one-stop came into play,” McLaren boss Andrea Stella explained to Sky Sports. “It took a dose of courage I think to do that, and for Russell, who was behind, there was less to lose.
“I think he had more motivation to do that, and it worked.”
Not for the first time but perhaps most emphatically, Piastri was McLaren’s lead driver this weekend. While he was pipped in qualifying, even Lando Norris admitted he wasn’t driving particularly well, and that difference in performance was shown up in the race, with the Briton unable to make an impact on the podium fight.
Piastri’s second-place finish puts him fourth in the championship just 10 points behind Charles Leclerc and only 32 points behind Norris.
It’s a sign of the slowly shifting power balance at McLaren.
While it’s far too early to say he’s bringing the team into his orbit, his maiden victory and increasing propensity to be the team’s quicker driver is establishing the Aussie as an equal number one that will make it difficult for the team to automatically throw its weight behind Norris in the drivers championship in the second half of the season.
“Oscar really gave everything,” Stella said. “A very attacking race form Oscar himself.
“A lot of points. We closed the gap further in the constructors championship. No-one thought this would be possible at the start of the season.
“We are in contention for the championship. We look forward to the second half of the season.”
Source Agencies
