Andrea Kimi Antonelli started qualifying feeling “a bit lost”. He ended it with the most dominant pole position of the season to date.
If you wanted a clear sign of what feels like the unstoppable momentum of the Italian teenager, this is it.
Championship leader Antonelli was eighth at the end of Q1. Not only that, but he’d slipped behind teammate George Russell, whom he’d been comfortably beating all weekend.
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“It was a weird qualifying because in Q1 I felt a bit lost, because the wind picked up a little bit and the balance was a bit more on the edge,” he said.
“But then obviously the session came to us, and Q3 was good because we did a decent first lap and then, on the second lap, found a lot of time.
“I just tried to carry a bit more speed everywhere, and the car stuck, so I’m happy with that.”
It was Antonelli’s sixth pole of the season and extended Mercedes’s qualifying record to a perfect 10 poles from 10 grands prix.
Despite being headed by Lando Norris after the first runs and despite some clever Red Bull Racing tactics to boost Max Verstappen’s chances of success, his 0.317-second pole margin suggested the result was never really in doubt.
George Russell didn’t get near Antonelli again after Q1 and was left to rue a lack of straight-line speed — not for the first time this season — as his foremost enemy in generating momentum for his championship campaign.
Hamilton smashes the wall in P3! | 01:08
RUSSELL DOESN’T LOVE THIS CAR, DOESN’T LOVE THIS ENGINE
Russell’s proclamation of adoration for his car and engine after controlling the Australian Grand Prix feels like they were around a million years ago.
The preseason title favourite has scrapped and scraped to find a solution to his missing pace ever since.
He’s been willing to accept that his driving style is playing a role.
On the one hand, his smooth driving inputs don’t seem to get the most from a Mercedes car that appears to respond better to Antonelli’s more scruff-of-the-neck approach.
On the other hand, his style also doesn’t gel with the requirements of this year’s hybrid engine, which wants to be driven in a very specific way in the corners to maximise recharge opportunities down the straights.
This effect is magnified at Spa-Francorchamps, where there are very few opportunities to recharge. Missing any one of them is massively detrimental down the track’s long power-thirsty straights.
Certainly that was Russell’s biggest issue during practice. He’s less confident in the way the car behaves, which means he loses more speed through the corners and recharges less. That in turn means he uses more battery power to get back up to speed, which means he then has less battery power to deploy down the straights.
Electrical power gives its best bang for buck overcoming drag at the start of the straights, so tiny mistakes in the corners are punished by potentially massive speed differences down the straights.
But Russell believes he cracked the required driving style before qualifying, yet the speed deficit, especially in the last sector, remained undiminished.
He was only 0.17 seconds down on Antonelli at Curve Paul Frère, the last real corner before the long back straight.
When he reaches Bus Stop, he’s 0.508 seconds behind.
“It’s pretty infuriating,” he said, per the BBC, pinning the blame on an undiagnosed car issue.
“My whole focus for the last 36 hours has been on straight-line speed. It hasn’t been focused on the set-up, the tyres or anything, because we’re all trying to solve what is going on.
“You’re watching [the display] on your steering wheel just losing speed when you’re full gas in the straight. You feel powerless. We don’t know what’s going on.
“I don’t think it’s the power unit, to be honest, but there’s something slowing us down in the straights, and the team are really, really on it now to try and solve it.
“Battling against Kimi is very tough in a fair fight. When we are in this situation it’s impossible.”
Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovline said “there is a clear loss that we cannot explain by driving style”, but team boss Toto Wolff said at least some of it was explained by Russell not being as on top of the car as his teammate.
“We will see on the next tracks because they will be less energy-starved, so it doesn’t make a big difference, and then there’s a few tenths that George needs to find,” he said.
“Lots of it he has already found, but over a few corners there’s still 0.2 or 0.25 seconds, so overall he has recovered well, but at the moment he doesn’t gel with the car, and he hasn’t for the last two weekends.
“That’s probably not his fault, but we just need to bring it together.”
The good news for Russell is that he’ll move up to third on the grid after Norris serves his 10-place penalty for taking new engine parts.
He might also be heartened by the fact the pole-getter has won only eight of the last 20 grands prix at Spa-Francorchamps. Of the 12 non-pole winners, five have come from beyond the first row.
“I pray I’m going to try and endure the pain of this issue tomorrow and hope for a great result and try and find a solution for next week,” he said.
Gasly suffers wild crash in Belgium | 00:27
PIASTRI DEFICIT ‘NOTHING TO DO WITH OSCAR’S DRIVING’
Russell wasn’t the only driver lamenting what he perceived to be anomalous power delivery characteristics in qualifying.
Oscar Piastri found himself battling a similar problem in Q3.
The Australian couldn’t match Norris’s pace on either run in Q3 despite the Briton abandoning his second lap.
His first attempt had him more than 0.6 seconds off his teammate’s pace but was easily explainable by a mistake through Les Combes and a bigger lift through Speaker Corner.
His second attempt, though, had him marginally ahead of Norris out of Pouhon, a traditionally strong Piastri corner, before making what looks like a tiny mistake in the middle of Les Fagnes chicane.
The error — if we can call it that — was so small that it cost him at most 0.01 seconds.
But that then appears to leave him out of battery power far earlier than Norris, and he’s nearly 0.4 seconds down by the time he reaches Bus Stop. He reduces the gap to 0.215 seconds over the line.
It left him seventh in the order, effectively last of the frontrunners, though he’ll move up to sixth thanks to his teammate’s penalty.
“If I compare Lando and Oscar in their best lap in Q3, Oscar is losing time in the final straight and Blanchimont for reasons that have nothing to do with Oscar’s driving,” McLaren boss Andrea Stella said, per the BBC. “They are just a minor deviation in how the power unit was operated.
“I think this seems to be pretty much the same across the two Mercedes cars — when you overlay Antonelli and Russell, it looks like Lando and Oscar.”
Piastri gave little away after the session other than to say it had been “a pretty big grid to get any lap time” out of his car.
He was optimistic, though, that he could move forwards in the race at a track he’s traditionally suited.
“I think we’re probably third or fourth quickest, but I think the order is very, very tight, so we can make a difference somehow,” he said.
Piastri responds to rumours | 01:14
VERSTAPPEN PRAISES TEAMMATE, CAR IN MOOD TURNAROUND
If there’s one thing less predictable than the F1 form guide, it’s Max Verstappen’s mood.
After weeks of speculation he was about to pull the plug on his Red Bull Racing team and maybe even quit the sport, he cut a much more mellow, comfortable figure after qualifying an improbable second in Belgium.
The key to his success was his team — or specifically his teammate, Isack Hadjar.
Hadjar is carrying a back-of-the-grid penalty for changing a variety of engine parts, so his appearance in Q3 was largely meaningless.
Red Bull Racing therefore deployed him to give Verstappen a slipstream on both of his pole attempts.
The first slipstream was well managed. The second one was right on the limit, with Verstappen almost nosing into the Frenchman’s gearbox through Blanchimont before pulling out on the run to Bus Stop.
It looked like a mistake, but it was in fact perfect. Verstappen never lifted off, and it gained him around 0.15 seconds on his previous best lap.
That second super-close slipstream was the difference between second and third, but he figured having the slipstream at all was worth more than just a couple of positions.
“I think otherwise you are P6 or something,” he said. “[Hadjar] is why we’re standing right here.”
But even accounting for the somewhat distorted result, Verstappen spoke in practically glowing terms about his car — equipped, notably, with an old rear wing after the previous specification had caused two crashes in as many weekends.
“The whole weekend the balance of the car has been quite decent,” he said. “I think we’re just a bit slow on the straight, but the car has been in the window, just trying to fine-tune it a little bit.”
The Dutchman is arguably in the preferred starting position on the front row given how powerful the slipstream is out of La Source and then down Kemmel.
He’ll surely be thinking of his P2 start in last year’s sprint, from where he easily passed pole-getter Piastri into Les Combes.
Piastri then did the same to pole-getter Norris in the grand prix.
But even if he gets into the lead, his straight-line speed deficit to Antonelli may leave him vulnerable to a pass sooner or later.
“The gap, even in qualifying with a massive tow, is still over 0.3 seconds, so I don’t really expect to race [Mercedes] tomorrow,” he said. “I think it’s more for me looking in the mirrors and fighting them or trying to fight them, but mainly just trying to do my own race and see where we end up.”
The hybrid engine’s boost button could change that dynamic somewhat, however — and as much as Verstappen hates these engines, you’d be brave to bet against him getting the most out of them at one of his favourite circuits.
Kostecki DOMINATES in Townsville | 01:11
FERRARI STILL DREAMING OF A PODIUM
The mood at Ferrari was mixed on Saturday night.
On the one hand, being half a second off the pace in the fourth-quickest car was the team’s worst qualifying result since the Japanese Grand Prix.
It was what the team feared at Silverstone too before unexpectedly scoring a two-three start only just being pole-getter Antonelli — and before Leclerc rocketed into a lead he’d never meaningfully relinquish.
On the other hand, despite the qualifying walloping, the team is optimistic that Sunday will be better from fourth and fifth on the grid.
For one, Leclerc believes he could have qualified ahead of Russell had he not mistakenly lifted off in the final chicane in Q3 owing to a yellow flag light he thought applied to the track but actually to the pit entry. It’s something he’s called for circuit organisers to change for next year.
Hamilton also said his car didn’t feel as strong in qualifying as it had before his crash in FP3, forcing an extensive rebuild.
The team is also optimistic that it has the race pace to back that up. Given Verstappen’s concerns about straight-line speed and Russell’s ongoing struggles, at least one podium position could be on the cards if Ferrari executes well.
“Still optimistic for tomorrow. I think there’s a chance, there’s all sorts of chances tomorrow to try and see if we can get on the podium. That’d be awesome.”
There’s a realistic proposition that it could neutralise points damage done by Mercedes and walk away from Belgium no worse off. At what should be one of Ferrari’s worst tracks, that would be a decent result.
But as is the case for everyone else on track this weekend, it seems like a case of damage limitation at best when it comes to Antonelli’s championship lead, which seems sure to grow again on Sunday.