{"id":811835,"date":"2026-07-20T08:15:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T08:15:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/811835\/"},"modified":"2026-07-20T08:15:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T08:15:15","slug":"welcome-to-the-jungle-when-formula-1-5-came-to-spa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/811835\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to the jungle? When Formula 1.5 came to Spa"},"content":{"rendered":"

Magnificent as Spa-Francorchamps is, this hallowed circuit is no stranger to grotesque miscarriages of competence.<\/p>\n

Think back to 2021 and a race which, thanks to wet weather (at Spa? Fancy that!), finally got under way some time after most respectable folk had popped their roast dinner in the oven, and then only for a couple of perfunctory laps behind the safety car before “sorry folks, no refunds”.<\/p>\n

And then there was the 1985 Belgian Grand Prix, where the organisers, in their wisdom, contrived to relay the circuit with an unproven and experimental aggregate 10 days before the race. Aggro was certainly what they got when the new track surface broke up and the entire event had to be abandoned on the Saturday afternoon, and rescheduled for later in the year.<\/p>\n

The spectacle of the 2026 weekend will now commingle with these ignominious examples in the swirling bin juice of history.<\/p>\n

Watching a\u00a0downforce-endowed racing car being driven at the limit through Pouhon, the sweeping double-left-hander, used to rank among the most visceral experiences an F1 fan could have. Well worth the hassle of the fickle Ardennes microclimate, along the heavy-handed security who always presented as simply begging for an excuse to set their dogs on you.<\/p>\n

With the current cars it\u2019s now easy-flat since the electrical reserves of their batteries are long since depleted \u2013 so the best drivers in the world simply roll their eyes, downshift, and wonder how it came to this.<\/p>\n

“I think no one out there is enjoying the qualifying lap as much as we did last year,” mused\u00a0Carlos Sainz<\/a>.\u00a0“I think it’s clear that we’ve lost quite a bit with these cars around Spa.\u00a0Having said that, I don’t want to keep belittling my own sport because it’s not going to do any good. I think we all know this is not good enough.<\/p>\n

\"Sainz <\/p>\n

Sainz wants answers on how it all came to this in F1<\/p>\n

Photo by: Steven Tee \/ LAT Images via Getty Images<\/p>\n

\u201cWhoever saw these simulations in 2022, 2023 and look at it and didn\u2019t say, \u2018how can we even accept that?\u2019 They need to review what happened there because it should never have happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

The commercial rights holders\u2019 response was to activate nothing-to-see-here mode. Throughout practice, it was rare indeed for the world TV feed to show onboard footage from a car passing through the areas most blighted by super clipping and such. One wondered how it would be possible to go through the entire race while only cutting to the in-car shot at the 50-metre board of the Bus Stop, for instance.<\/p>\n

After qualifying, F1 made a point of sharing on social media the full on-board lap from\u00a0polesitter Antonelli\u2019s car \u2013 minus, conspicuously, the usual graphics demonstrating speeds and the battery\u2019s state of charge. There are few things in this world more obvious than drunk people trying to sneak into a house quietly, but full marks to F1 for brazenly testing the boundaries of what\u2019s possible.<\/p>\n

“When you’ve got qualifying grids decided by computers behaving or misbehaving, it’s a pretty crap way of going racing” Oscar Piastri<\/a><\/p>\n

Antonelli\u2019s pole lap was 1m44.361s, the better part of four seconds slower than last year\u2019s pole position time. Lance Stroll<\/a>\u2019s will-this-do qualifying lap aboard the miserable Aston Martin AMR26 was 1m50.177s.<\/p>\n

Rafael\u00a0Camara\u2019s Formula 2 pole time was 1m56.306s. This writer did not have an Adrian Newey car being closer in pace to the product of an increasingly pointless spec-chassis series than that of a proper F1 car on the bingo card for 2026, but them\u2019s the breaks. Perhaps it\u2019s time to institute a Formula 1.5 category.<\/p>\n

Most onerous of all, this was yet another race in which we were spared disaster only by the skills of the drivers.<\/p>\n

\"The <\/p>\n

The speed differences witnessed at the start of the Belgian GP warned of a dangerous precedent<\/p>\n

Photo by: Andy Hone\/ LAT Images via Getty Images<\/p>\n

\u201cI expected Kimi [Antonelli] to come by, and then I looked in my mirror and just saw a red rocket [Charles Leclerc<\/a>] coming,\u201d said Max Verstappen<\/a> of the harum-scarum run to Les Combes on the opening lap.\u00a0\u201cI was like, \u2018Oh, I’ll just hold my line because if I move here, we’re going to have an airplane shunt.\u2019 So, it was pretty incredible, the [speed] differences.\u00a0Welcome to F1 2026. Sometimes it can be a jungle.\u201d<\/p>\n

When drivers are barely in control of their cars, owing to the opaque effects of the machine-learning algorithms which determine how much electrical power can be meted out and when, a reckoning is surely coming. Interestingly, on Sunday afternoon UK TV viewers had a choice between watching the Belgian Grand Prix on Sky Sports F1 or the\u00a0Deal Or No Deal Celebrity Special on ITV, a show in which the aim is in effect to guess the contents of a box. Long-term, it is probably cheaper to watch the latter.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt sucks,\u201d said\u00a0Oscar Piastri \u2013 not of Deal Or No Deal or its \u2018celebrity\u2019 line-up, but of the powerlessness of the drivers to make a difference when software determines how much energy they\u2019re granted.\u00a0\u201cI can’t really say it any other way than that… when you’ve got qualifying grids decided by computers behaving or misbehaving, it’s a pretty crap way of going racing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read Also:<\/p>\n

\"Piastri <\/p>\n

Piastri and co continue to be left frustrated by the new F1 cars<\/p>\n

Photo by: Marc Fleury<\/p>\n

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– The Autosport.com Team<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Magnificent as Spa-Francorchamps is, this hallowed circuit is no stranger to grotesque miscarriages of competence. Think back to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":811836,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[573],"tags":[64,63,814,815,817,813,816,85,386761],"class_list":["post-811835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-belgian-gp","tag-circuit-de-spa-francorchamps","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports","tag-welcome-to-the-jungle-when-formula-1-5-came-to-spa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=811835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811835\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/811836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=811835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=811835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=811835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}