Max Verstappen started the Belgian Grand Prix from 14th place on the grid due to his engine penalty. It only took 18 laps of the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps for the Dutchman to lead for the first time. After the first round of pitstops and his overtaking move on Carlos Sainz, the dominator of Spa was nowhere to be seen. Teammate Sergio Perez was 17.8 seconds off the finish line. Carlos Sainz in the better placed Ferrari was 26.8 seconds behind and George Russell in the only Mercedes was 29.1 seconds behind. Those are huge differences.
The World Champion would have won that day with any strategy and tire choice. He was up to a second faster with old soft tires than Sergio Perez with fresh medium rubber. He could do fast laps in a row without the tires showing any signs of wear.
Max Verstappen set the fastest lap of the race on lap 32, although Charles Leclerc had much better chances on paper on the last lap with 30 kilograms less fuel in the tank and the support of DRS in the slipstream of Fernando Alonso. Nevertheless, the Ferrari driver was six tenths slower.
In the first 13 races, Red Bull and Ferrari went head-to-head, with most of the time just a tenth of a second separating their World Championship rivals. And Mercedes had improved so much that it was enough for a pole position at the Hungaroring circuit in Budapest. At Spa, the Maranello team lost 0.6 and Mercedes 1.8 seconds in qualifying. The hope that warmer weather and the more conservative choice on Sunday would reverse the balance of power was not true. On the contrary: Red Bull had the least tire wear in the race, Ferrari the most.
That was the reason why Carlos Sainz feared for his third place in the duel with George Russell. “The Ferrari was the faster car, but it handled its tires worse. That made us look better in the race,” admit the Mercedes engineers.
What didn’t fit into the picture at all was Red Bull’s special position. Sports director Helmut Marko put it in a nutshell: “A very good engine in the best chassis with an outstanding Verstappen in the cockpit.” Team boss Christian Horner said: “The track suited us. But we didn’t expect to win so easily. Max appeared at the top much earlier than we had calculated. It was our most dominant performance since Sebastian Vettel’s winning streak in 2013.”
Efficiency only half the benefit
Red Bull’s exceptional superiority has a lot to do with the circuit. Not just because Spa-Francorchamps demands more efficiency from the car than any other circuit. You need top speed in sectors 1 and 3 and downforce in the middle section with its ten corners. Nobody manages this balancing act better than the Red Bull, because the RB18 generates more downforce via the underbody than any other car in the field and therefore doesn’t put as much wing into the wind.
But that’s only half the benefit. Spa is a special case in terms of car ride height because of Eau Rouge and a nasty bump in the Stavelot corners. The teams had to raise their cars five to six millimetres higher than usual. This would have happened even without the Technical Directive, which many teams had hoped could become a stumbling block for Red Bull and Ferrari.
It was believed that much of Red Bull and Ferrari’s superiority was due to their ‘soft’ floors, which allowed the two championship rivals to drive their cars lower. “You should make directives like this more often. They seem to give us wings and slow down others who wanted to harm us,” Christian Horner hit out at Toto Wolff.
Show your support for Scuderia Ferrari with official merchandise collection from Puma! Enter the online Puma Store and shop securely! And get your F1 tickets for every race with VIP hospitality and unparalleled insider access. Click here for the best offers to support Charles and Carlos from the track!
In fact, this time the ground clearance had to be increased by a bit more than the engineers had calculated. This was due to the ominous bump between turns 14 and 15. This put Ferrari and Mercedes in a window in which their aerodynamics no longer delivered the downforce that they were used to.
As a consequence, both Ferrari and Mercedes had to trim the suspension harder than usual, which also cost mechanical grip. The Red Bull felt comfortable with more ride height and therefore also reached its normal form: “Over the course of the season, we’ve shown more than once that our car can handle more ground clearance,” confirmed Horner.
The introduction of the technical directive against bouncing had practically no effect on the balance of power at Spa. It only aims to prevent the aerodynamically generated bouncing. That was not a problem for the teams, according to Aston Martin technical director Andy Green: “If the limit was 100, we were at three. Spa was much less critical than Baku. But even then we would have stayed below the limit.”
Leave a Reply