Red Bull Motorsports
F1
This is what went down at the Belgian Grand Prix
Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel closed the gap on championship rival Lewis Hamilton with an effective victory at Spa-Franchorchamps, while Max Verstappen stormed through to a strong third.
Sebastian Vettel beat his great rival Lewis Hamilton by 11 seconds at the Belgian Grand Prix in Spa-Francorchamps, while Max Verstappen recovered from a poor starting position to finish third, but it wasn't a race that's going to live long in the memory of F1 fans.
Formula One does its best work in the high, old places of Europe. A sport both buoyed and tortured by its own history, nowhere does Grand Prix racing seem a better fit than on its ancestral turf, and they don't come more ancestral than Spa-Francorchamps. The Beast of the Ardennes was one of the original venues when the F1 World Championship cranked into life in 1950, and while the Belgian Grand Prix hasn't been particularly faithful, departing and disappearing at various times, it's always returned to Spa eventually, because few other circuits are able to show off what Formula One machinery does at its absolute best.
Mercurial weather is part of the attraction at Spa, and Saturday's qualifying session provided the requisite amount of wet-track drama, but Spa doesn't need gimmicks: it's more than capable of delivering drama on a dry afternoon and it did just that today – but only for the first lap. That determined the outcome of the race. After that, little happened.
Over the years, the La Source Hairpin has provided great drama. It's been reshaped, but is still capable of delivering a shock, and it did so today. Renault's Nico Hülkenberg had a fairly comprehensive lockup and barrelled into Fernando Alonso's McLaren at close to full speed, ripping into the sidepod of the orange car and launching Alonso into the air. Charles Leclerc was collected in the crash, and has the Halo to thank for deflecting Alonso's airborne car over his head, while Daniel Ricciardo had his rear wing cleaved before the McLaren had stopped, and then, slithering out of the corner, clipped Kimi Räikkönen's rear wheel, giving the Finn a puncture.
Oblivious to all of this, the leaders were away. Starting P2, Vettel tucked into Hamilton's slipstream at the exit of La Source, followed through Eau Rouge and Radillon, and took the lead on the Kemmel Straight. He stayed in front for the next 44 laps. "It was a good start," said Vettel. "I had a little bit better start, but it's not a long way to Turn One so I tried to get myself into position on the exit, and got it right. After that it was quite intense, the first stint, and then after that I controlled the pace well."
Esteban Ocon, starting third for the new-but-not-really Racing Point Force India team attempted to leapfrog both leaders into Les Combes. He couldn't quite make it stick and was himself passed by opportunistic team-mate Sergio Pérez.
The Safety Car came out while the wreckage was shovelled up and Ricciardo and Räikkönen limped back to the pits. Ricciardo should have retired on the spot, but Red Bull Racing took advantage of the long safety car period and replaced his rear wing – something not usually seen in modern F1. He returned to the track two laps down, but would, like Räikkönen, retire later in the race.
At the restart, the drivers on the move were Verstappen and Valtteri Bottas. The Dutchman, cheered on by a largely orange-clad crowd, had started seventh and moved up to sixth on the first lap. After the restart, he stalked and then passed the Racing Point drivers one-by-one by getting late on the brakes into Les Combes, and settled into P3. Bottas had started in P17 after Mercedes elected to take penalties and give him a new power unit ahead of the power-dominated Spa and Monza double header. He lost his front wing on the first lap after running into the back of Williams's Lance Stroll,but the Safety Car gave him ample time to recover. He threaded his way through the field and completed an excellent damage-limitation drive.
Behind Bottas, the Racing Point pair finished the race as they had finished the first lap, with Pérez in front of Ocon. Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnusson finished seventh and eighth for Haas, Pierre Gasly had a good race to ninth for Toro Rosso, and Marcus Ericsson bagged the final point for Sauber.
While Lewis Hamilton saw his Drivers' Championship lead cut to 17 points, Räikkönen's retirement and Bottas's recovery saw the Mercedes team increase its Constructors' Championship advantage by a further five points to 15. However, Vettel’s untroubled victory suggest Ferrari has the advantage heading to their home race at Monza next weekend. "They out-performed us today," said a subdued Hamilton. "We've just got to work harder."
Racing Point(s)
F1 has a new team this weekend. Or rather it doesn't. Sahara Force India has ceased to exist and Racing Point Force India has arrived. Bar a few missing logos and some changes at the top of the management tree, you'd be hard pressed to see a difference, but in a legally-acceptable sense Racing Point is an entirely new entity, attending its first Grand Prix this weekend.
This was seen as the most practical way of keeping the Silverstone-based team up and running, although it relies on a fair amount of goodwill from the rest of the paddock and the FIA choosing to interpret various aspects of the sporting regulations in an unusually generous manner. The upshot is that the (old) Force India lost all of their 2018 points and the new team started from zero, while the new team kept the old team's power unit allocation because everyone thinks that's fair.
Who goes where?
Silly season is supposed to by winding down now, but this year, as each 2019 seat is confirmed, the speculation seems to become more intense regarding those remaining.
The key item of interest at the moment is the future of Esteban Ocon. Consensus seemed to suggest the Mercedes junior would be moving from Force India to Renault for 2019. But then Renault signed Daniel Ricciardo to partner Nico Hülkenberg. With Lance Stroll widely expected to move into Ocon's current seat next year (if not earlier), Ocon – third on the grid and sixth at the flag in Belgium – is now linked with every other seat not absolutely nailed down. Certainly, the young Frenchman is too good to sit on the bench, although sometimes that's what happens.
Lewis Hamilton summed up the situation very well on Saturday. "Unfortunately we're in a weird place in Formula One where you've got some teams that, rather than take a new up-and-coming kid, they'll take whoever's got the money, which means the structure of the sport is probably wrong," he said. "I've not read of who's signed where and what seats are available, but he needs to be in a great car because he's one of the top drivers here. I hope that opportunity is there for him."
Max's orange army
The travelling army of Max Verstappen fans has become a constant at the European rounds of F1 in the last two seasons, but nowhere is it more prevalent than in Spa. Numbers vary, and it's impossible to accurately count how many of the crowd make the short trip from the Netherlands without installing a passport check, but it's a lot.
Clamour continues to grow for a return of the Dutch Grand Prix to the calendar, with both the race's previous home at Zandvoort and the TT Circuit at Assen frequently mentioned. The Dutch fans didn't get to see a Max Verstappen victory this weekend, but they did at least get to hear the Wilhelmus after Nyck De Vries took a brilliant lights-to-flag win in the F2 feature race on Saturday.
