You’ll never find a more dominant drive to 15th place on a grid than Max Verstappen’s storming non-pole lap at the Belgian Grand Prix.
The Dutchman was absolutely untouchable, his Red Bull Racing so much at home around Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps that he was entirely nonplussed by the scale of his superiority in the aftermath.
Or perhaps it was because he hadn’t quite worked out exactly where he’d be starting given the arithmetic required to calculate the grid thanks to the seven drivers set to receive post-qualifying penalties.
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A bevy of cars have had new power units and gearboxes installed ahead of the final nine races of the season, keeping the stewards busy dishing out grid drops, including to title leader Verstappen.
The Dutchman will start 15th as the quickest of those penalised, having topped qualifying, with fading title hopeful Charles Leclerc just behind him in 16th after qualifying fourth.
Having the championship’s two heaviest hitters start badly out of position opens the door to victory for one the sport’s lesser spotted contenders. Carlos Sainz and Sergio Perez will share the front row, the former hoping to continue his establishment in this year’s Ferrari, the latter needing to rediscover some form after a mid-campaign slump.
Can Mercedes play a role in the battle? Not on the basis of its qualifying performance. If Verstappen’s 15th was uncharacteristically outstanding, Lewis Hamilton and George Russell starting fourth and fifth was deceptively underwhelming.
It all adds up to what should be an action-packed, mixed-grid Belgian Grand Prix.
VERSTAPPEN UNTOUCHABLE, FERRARI CONFOUNDED
As remarkable as Verstappen and Red Bull Racing have been so far at Spa, equally notable is how wildly disappointing Ferrari has been at the same time.
The Scuderia had hoped its Friday disparity was more to do with a wrong set-up choice, but come Saturday it was clear this was no circumstantial gap. Verstappen was so quick that he was top qualifier with just one lap set. He retired from the session without a second attempt, so confident was he in his effort.
Ferrari then deployed Leclerc — who was due to serve a penalty anyway — to slipstream Sainz in an attempt to keep him ahead of Perez, but the run was mistimed. Sainz failed to improve, and it was only because Perez likewise couldn’t find time that the Spaniard will line up on pole alongside the Mexican.
“They seem to be flying this weekend,” said Leclerc, who will start 16th behind Verstappen. “Since FP1 they’ve been on another level.”
More concerning is that it comes off the back of an underwhelming result in Hungary, where the team openly admitted that for the first time it didn’t understand why the car wasn’t performing as expected.
Leclerc feared it could be the start of a trend rather than a blip.
“I mean, if it’s track specific, then they built this car exactly for this track, because seven tenths is a lot,” he said.
“I don’t know. They found something this weekend that is quite impressive. I mean, it’s a big gap.
“I hope that in Zandvoort it will change.”
Sainz emphasised that the SF-75 actually felt decent around the lap but just lacked pace, making it even more difficult to understand the gap.
“[It] is a bit puzzling, because we’ve been on the pace all year,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s temperatures, the efficiency of their car or whatever, it’s just putting them with a very healthy margin ahead that is making our life a bit more difficult.”
The beginning of an answer lies in aerodynamic efficiency. Ferrari has been the slightly draggier car all season in exchange for being supreme in the corners. It’s still faster in the slow and medium-speed bends at Spa, but it’s being hammered everywhere else.
The giveaway is that the SF-75 was faster on the Kemmel Straight, where it could use the DRS to dump some of that drag, but at none of the other flat-out sections.
Spa is one of the most extreme compromise circuits on the calendar in terms of set-up, which perhaps exacerbated the problem, but the gap is too big to explain away as being simply down to circumstance.
Without a much stronger race performance on Sunday, this will be an extremely concerning weekend for Ferrari.
SAINZ AND PEREZ IN THE BOX SEAT — OR ARE THEY?
The effect of having Verstappen and Leclerc out of contention is that the door is open to Sainz and Perez to fight for victory — probably.
Six of the last seven pole-getters at Spa-Francorchamps went on to win the race, but starting second can be potent if wielded correctly.
Getting a strong launch, the second-placed driver can power out of La Source and slipstream the leader all the way down to Eau Rouge and down the Kemmel Straight. If they get it right, they’ll fly past long before Les Combes.
It puts the onus on the leader to be tactful in the first corner and potentially — and sometimes dangerously — through Eau Rouge to disrupt the follower’s momentum, which is easier said than done when the entire field is close behind and ready to capitalise on any error.
But it may not all be down to the start given Red Bull Racing’s handy advantage down the straights. Keeping within DRS range is probably all Perez will need to take the lead.
But will that be enough for victory?
Verstappen has targeted a podium at a minimum despite starting 15th, such is the speed of his car.
Russell even doubts there’ll be much competition against him topping the rostrum.
“Max will slice through and win the race probably pretty comfortably,” he said. “He and Red Bull are miles ahead of everyone.”
It would potentially put Red Bull Racing in a difficult situation if Perez were leading and Verstappen closed up behind him. With an 80-point advantage, would Verstappen be ordered into the lead, and what might that do to Perez’s morale?
You’d have to think Max’s momentum would be irresistible just to make it that high up the order. It may not come to the pit wall at all.
PENALTY QUIRK REWARDS BOTTAS IN GRID MESS
Verstappen and Leclerc were far from the only drivers to cop grid penalties this weekend — in fact seven other drivers are being sent to the lower reaches of the pack.
But not all penalties are equal.
Formula 1 loves a good rules quirk, and you’d struggle to find a better one than that which decided the back of the grid.
When a driver accumulates a grid drop of at least 20 places for any one offence, the FIA sends them directly to the back of the grid given there are only 20 drivers. When multiple drivers receive the same definitive back-of-grid penalty, their order on the grid is decided by their qualifying times, not how many penalty places they may have accrued.
It meant we faced the highly unusual situation of Q3, normally the pole shootout, being largely about deciding 15th to 18th.
Verstappen (first in qualifying), Leclerc (fourth), Esteban Ocon (fifth), Lando Norris (10th), Zhou Guanyu (13th) and Mick Schumacher (15th) were therefore sent to the back of the grid in that order and will start 15th to 20th respectively.
But there’s a loophole in the regulations that means penalties handed down for separate offences don’t accumulate to one of these definitive back-of-grid punishments.
Valtteri Bottas, for example, was handed four separate penalties of 15, 10, 10 and five places respectively. In total that’s 40 places, but he was never for any one individual offence penalised 20 places or more.
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As a result, and despite qualifying 20th and last on Saturday afternoon, he’ll start 14th on the grid. Because 40 places is a lesser penalty than being sent to the back of the grid.
What’s more, Alfa Romeo knew that he couldn’t start lower than 14th — ahead of all those drivers sent to the back — and therefore used him to slipstream Zhou Guanyu in Q2, where he beat Mick Schumacher and will therefore start 19th instead of 20th.
To recap: Bottas qualified 20th, served a 40-place grid penalty and will start the race 14th.
His wasn’t the only unusual result.
Daniel Ricciardo wasn’t carrying a penalty, was knocked out 11th and will start seventh, his highest starting place since the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix back in April.
Sometimes you’ve got to love the rules.
WOLFF SLAMS MERCEDES IN DECADE-WORST QUALIFYING PERFORMANCE
If that mental arithmetic made your head hurt, spare a thought for Mercedes, which just suffered what Toto Wolff described as the worst since he joined the team a decade ago.
The door should’ve been open to Mercedes taking its first win of the season with two of the frontrunners out of the equation, and yet the German marque has never once looked close to the pace all weekend.
Lewis Hamilton was an enormous 1.8 seconds slower than Verstappen in seventh. George Russell was 2.1 seconds adrift in eighth. They’ll start fourth and fifth after penalties.
This comes just one round after the team thought — not for the first time this season — that it had finally turned a corner, having taken pole with Russell in Hungary before Hamilton led his teammate to a competitive two-three finish.
“You can’t be on pole three weeks before — albeit very different conditions, different track — and then the 1.8 seconds of the pace the next one,” a deeply dispirited Wolff said. “There’s something which we totally don’t understand, seem to get right.
“It’s for me the worst qualifying session that I’ve had in 10 years irrespective of what positions we’re going to start tomorrow.
“Being on pole then three weeks later being nowhere is just not acceptable for ourselves.”
A look at the telemetry shows the car is slow just about everywhere compared to Verstappen, with only a minor performance advantage through the slow last chicane and first turn.
The car is also the slowest in the speed trap.
“The car is draggy in a straight line,” Wolff scathed. “It is unstable at the rear. It understeers through eight and nine. It bounces through the high speed and gives no confidence.
“I mean, there’s not a positive that I heard about how the car performs here this weekend and throughout the weekend.
“I think now it’s time to consolidate and decide what we do next.”
The only possibly bright spot is that the Mercedes has tended to be quicker in race trim this year than over a single lap — but Wolff argued this wouldn’t make yet another dispiriting round any better.
“I wouldn’t be flattered by a positive race result, whatever that may be,” he said. “Some of the top guys are starting from the back, and that for me, in my performance assessment of where we are, it plays a minor role.”
What could have been a second-high weekend increasingly feels like one of the team’s worst performances of the year.
