The hotter track of race day made thermal deg of the rear tyres the limiting factor for everyone and ensured it was a two-stop race. But the effect on the Red Bulls, Verstappen’s in particular, was nowhere near as severe as on the Ferraris.
With a great balance and good downforce, the Red Bull was keeping its tyres in shape better than any other. Its slow corner performance was getting it onto the straights faster, making it quick through sectors 1 and 3 despite a relatively big wing. That wing then helped it to its devastating speed through the fast corners of sector 2. It was all about aero efficiency at this low end of the downforce scale which Spa demands. It exposed a Ferrari weakness not otherwise seen this year. The hot track and tyre demands just amplified Red Bull’s advantage. Perez was able to pick off Sainz late in the second stint, just as Verstappen had done a few laps earlier.
This left Sainz to fend off George Russell whose Mercedes was, as usual, relatively good on the tyres in the race but too slow to warm them up in qualifying. His was the only Mercedes in the race after Lewis Hamilton turned in on Fernando Alonso at Les Combes on the first lap, trying to take second place. The overlapping wheels sent the Merc airborne, breaking its suspension and forcing Hamilton to pull off. Alonso lost a couple of places but his Alpine was undamaged.
Leclerc was running a distant fifth before the decision to pit…
Ferrari
Leclerc – forced to pit under the safety car to have Verstappen’s visor rip-off removed from a front brake duct – rejoined near the back and eventually got up to a distant fifth, well behind Russell and suffering just the same tyre deg problems as Sainz. Near the end, the stop for the soft tyres with which to try for the fastest lap lost him a place to Alonso, which he clawed back on the next lap. But a 5sec penalty for pitlane speeding put him behind the Alpine in the official results.
Alonso didn’t have Russell’s pace in the race despite having out-qualified him (with the help of a tow from team mate Esteban Ocon, who started a penalised 16th). Ocon drove a great race to be up with Alonso by the end. He passed Sebastian Vettel and Pierre Gasly in one move into Les Combes – the Aston and AlphaTauri finishing behind him in eighth and ninth, with Alex Albon taking the final point for Williams after getting it into Q3 for the first time. He was tenacious in using the car’s prodigious straightline speed to keep quicker cars behind him for as long as possible. McLaren’s lack of straightline speed ruined its race, putting both Daniel Ricciardo and the grid-penalised Lando Norris into DRS trains from which there was no escape.
“It’s been a weekend I couldn’t imagine before,” said Verstappen who came into the weekend somewhat gloomily, knowing of his impending grid penalty. “But I think we want more of them.”