Formula 1

Formula 1 made its annual stop at Spa-Francorchamps, the historic track that winds its way through the hills and trees of the Ardennes. I’ll admit, I’d been waiting for this one; in fact, I’ve become somewhat of a Spa bore, having fallen in love with the place all over again a few weeks ago while attending the Crowdstrike 24-hour GT3 race.

The 4.3 mile (6.9 km) track delivers, whether that’s as a challenge to the drivers—corners like Eau Rouge, Raidillon, Pouhon, and Blanchiment are the equal of any. There’s elevation change, something that neither Monza nor Silverstone nor Montreal can offer. It has history, dating back well before the start of the Formula 1 world championship in 1949, albeit in a much longer, much scarier version that was truncated by more than half in 1979. The views are spectacular from almost anywhere you choose to watch from, and despite the track’s size, its a pleasant and easy walk through the forest paths (just as long as you can stop imagining that one scene from Band of Brothers).

The food and drink in the region are worth a visit by themselves, and architecture fans will enjoy the Belgians’ chaotic attitude toward planning permission and house renovations, which appears to boil down to “do whatever you like as long as it looks good and won’t fall down.” Pretty good driving roads in the area, too, although they get even better toward the Nürburgring, just over an hour away in Germany.

The other thing Spa has plenty of is weather. (Well, almost always; while it rained during practice for the 24 hour race last month, the race itself was completely dry. As was the Nürburgring 24 the weekend before. And the 24 Hours of Le Mans the week before that. Which scares me.) But there was weather aplenty for the 2025 Belgian Grand Prix.

Sprint weekend

This year Spa held a sprint weekend, significantly shortening the practice time available to teams, most of whom brought technical upgrades to the race. Sprint qualifying was determined by track evolution, with the surface getting grippier as more and more cars attempted to set fast times. Sauber rookie Gabriel Bortoleto in particular garnered some well-deserved attention for getting into SQ3, up among the very fastest cars, as did the Haas of Oliver Bearman (and his anything-but-a-rookie teammate Nico Hulkenberg).

McLaren’s Oscar Pastri secured the pole for the sprint race, lining up next to the Red Bull of Max Verstappen, a team now under the direction of Laurent Miekes after Red Bull’s corporate owners gave founding team principal Christian Horner his marching orders two weeks ago. As I wrote some months ago, for the past few years Red Bull’s design team has built cars that, while theoretically fast, are so difficult to drive at the limit that only Verstappen can exploit them properly. A single driver in the fastest car can win the driver’s championship, but if you want the team’s title—and that’s the one the bonuses are tied to, usually—then you better have both cars scoring good points. Just ask McLaren.

And Red Bull can no longer claim to have built the fastest car, even in Verstappen’s hands.

That said, starting in second place at Spa is not so bad. After the slow hairpin of La Source—which McLaren has finally built a car able to cope with—there’s a long run to Les Coombes, with the challenge of Eau Rouge and Raidillon on the way. Verstappen got a good tow from the slipstream behind Piastri’s car along the Kemmel straight toward Les Coombes (isn’t it better when all the parts of the track have actual names and not just turn 1, turn 2, etc?) and got past, staying there in first place until the end, 15 laps later. Behind him, Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc did something similar to Piastri’s McLaren teammate, Lando Norris.

Although the Mclaren is a faster car than either the Red Bull or Ferrari, at Spa its speed came in the corners, and the orange cars were unable to close on or pass their rivals on the straights.

Teams and drivers faced a dilemma for Sunday’s race. They could either set their cars up for dry running, with less downforce and more top speed, or give them a higher downforce setup to capitalize on the rain. The thing is, they have to make that decision before qualifying on Saturday, then stick with it. Changes are allowed to setup, but only if you opt to start from the pitlane.

The McLarens took first and second in qualifying, with an amazing lap by Charles Leclerc that pipped Verstappen to third place by 3 milliseconds. Alex Albon got his Williams into a fine fifth place, and Red Bull’s other driver, Yuki Tsunoda—who has a much better relationship with Miekes than he ever did with Horner—made it into seventh just 0.3 seconds behind his otherworldly teammate. Bortotelo repeated his feat, snatching 10th in qualifying.

Not everyone had a good quali, particularly not Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton, who was eliminated among the first drivers for the second time in two days, something the seven-time World Champion described as unacceptable. Mercedes’ young phenom, Kimi Antonelli, who replaced Hamilton, was also eliminated among the first batch, part of a miserable weekend for the Italian who just graduated from high school.

Race day

Sunday morning was greeted with plenty of rain, affecting the support races and then delaying the start of the Grand Prix. Formula 1 has both intermediate and wet grooved tires, which pump gallons of water into the air from the track at speed, creating huge clouds of visibility-obscuring spray that, at a place like Spa, just hang between the trees. It’s this lack of visibility, rather than the wet track itself, that makes F1 so cautious, and so the formation lap was held behind the safety car, at which point the race officials decided to red flag things and wait for some more rain to come through and then leave.

The race eventually began 90 minutes late and circulated behind the safety car for far longer than was necessary, given the emergence of a dry line before too long. The red flag gave plenty of drivers and teams the opportunity to tweak their setups for the rain—something that turned out to be the wrong move given the FIA’s reticence to throw the green flag.

Piastri, in second place behind Norris, did to his teammate what Verstappen had done to him the day before and snatched the lead well before Les Coombes, staying just far enough ahead of his closest rival for the championship throughout the race. A small mistake by Norris and a slightly slower pitstop from his team meant he never got close enough to challenge Piastri for the lead. Behind them, Verstappen was similarly unable to make his way past Leclerc.

Star of the race for me, and the viewers who voted him driver of the day, was Hamilton. Starting from the very back of the queue in the pitlane, Hamilton’s Ferrari was set up for wet weather, and yet again we saw the skills that have won him more F1 races than any other driver in history. Have you ever seen someone overtake at Stavelot? I might have, but only in Gran Turismo 7.

A key to Hamilton’s success was pitting for slick tires at the right time—lap 11, just ahead of almost everyone else—and the British driver finished in seventh place at the end, behind the low-downforce Williams of Albon.

The 2025 race will not rank high in the pantheon of Belgian Grands Prix in terms of a thrilling race, but if you’re a motorsport fan, you owe it to yourself to make it out there sometime. Did I mention the World Endurance Championship has a six-hour race there in May? The tickets are far cheaper than F1, and you get a lot more access, too.

Formula 1’s busy 2025 schedule saw the sport return to its European heartland this past weekend. Italy has two races on the calendar this year, and this was the first, the (deep breath) “Formula 1 AWS Gran Premio Del Made in Italy e Dell’Emilia-Romagna,” which took place at the scenic and historic (another deep breath) Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari, better known as Imola. It’s another of F1’s old-school circuits where overtaking is far from easy, particularly when the grid is as closely matched as it is. But Sunday’s race was no snoozer, and for a couple of teams, there was a welcome change in form.

Red Bull was one. The team has looked a bit shambolic at times this season, with some wondering whether this change in form was the result of a number of high-profile staff departures toward the end of last season. Things looked pretty bleak during the first of three qualifying sessions, when Yuki Tsunoda got too aggressive with a curb and, rather than finding lap time, found himself in a violent crash that tore all four corners off the car and relegated him to starting the race last from the pit lane.

2025 has also been trying for Ferrari. Italy expects a lot from the red team, and the replacement of Mattia Binotto with Frédéric Vasseur as team principal was supposed to result in Maranello challenging for championships. Signing Lewis Hamilton, a bona fide superstar with seven titles already on his CV, hasn’t exactly reduced the amount of pressure on Scuderia Ferrari, either.

Lewis Hamilton was much closer to teammate Charles Leclerc this weekend, which will be encouraging to everyone. After Hamilton’s exclusion from the Chinese Grand Prix, he has had to run a higher ride height, which has cost him speed relative to his younger teammate. Now it looks like he’s getting a handle on the car and lost out to Leclerc by 0.06 seconds in Q1 and 0.16 seconds in Q2. Unfortunately, Leclerc’s time was only good for 11th, and Hamilton’s was only good for 12th.

Sunday brought smiles for the Red Bull and Ferrari teams. In the hands of Verstappen, the Red Bull was about as fast as the black-and-orange McLarens, and while second was the best Verstappen could do in qualifying, the gap to McLaren’s Oscar Piastri was measured in the hundredths of a second.

Verstappen’s initial start from the line looked unremarkable, too—the Mercedes of George Russell seemed more of a threat to the pole man. But Verstappen saw an opportunity and drove around the outside almost before Piastri even registered he was there, seizing the lead of the race. Once the Red Bull driver was in clean air, he was able to stretch the gap to Piastri.

Getting past someone is notoriously hard at Imola. In a 2005 classic, Fernando Alonso held off Michael Schumacher’s much faster car for the entire race. Even though the cars are larger and heavier now and more closely matched, overtaking was still possible, like Norris’ pass on Russell.

Undercut? Overcut?

But when overtaking is as hard as it is at a track like Imola, teams will try to use strategy to pass each other with pit stops. Each driver has to make at least one pit stop, as drivers are required to use two different tire compounds during the race. But depending on other factors, like how much the tires degrade, a team might decide to do two or even three stops—the lap time lost in the pits by stopping more often can be less than the time lost running on worn-out rubber.

In recent years, the word “undercut” has crept into F1 vocab, and no, it doesn’t refer to the hairstyles favored by the more flamboyant drivers in the paddock. To undercut a rival means to make your pit stop before them and then, on fresh tires and with a clear track ahead, set fast lap after fast lap so that when your rival makes their stop, they emerge from the pits behind you.

The undercut doesn’t always work, but in Imola, it initially looked like it did. Charles Leclerc stopped on lap 10 and leapfrogged Russell’s Mercedes, as well as his former Ferrari teammate and now Williams driver Carlos Sainz. Since Piastri wasn’t closing on Verstappen up front, McLaren decided to bring him in for an early stop.

But his advantage on new tires was not enough to eat into Verstappen’s margin, and he did not emerge in clean air but rather had to overtake car after car on track as he sought to regain his position ahead of those who hadn’t stopped. Sometimes, a strategy is the wrong one.

McLaren’s other driver, Lando Norris, couldn’t make a dent on Red Bull’s race, either. Having recognized the two-stop undercut wouldn’t work, Norris had stayed out, but he was almost 10 seconds behind Verstappen when it was finally time to change tires on lap 29. Shortly afterward, Esteban Ocon pulled his Haas to the side of the track with a powertrain failure, triggering a virtual safety car. With all the cars required to drive around at a prescribed, reduced pace, Verstappen was able to take his pit stop while only losing half as much time as anyone who stopped under green flag conditions.

Victory required a little more. Kimi Antonelli’s Mercedes also ground to a halt in a position that required a full safety car. With some on fresh rubber and others not, there were battles aplenty, but Verstappen wasn’t involved in any and won by seven seconds over Norris, with the recovering Piastri a few more seconds down the road.

Meanwhile, Hamilton had been having a pretty good Sunday of his own. Although he started 12th, he finished fourth, to the delight of the partisan, flag-waving crowd. Some of that was thanks to Leclerc coming together with the Williams of Alex Albon; after that on-track scuffle was sorted, Albon lay fifth, with Leclerc at sixth. Albon was right to feel aggrieved that he lost fourth place but equalled his best finish of the year.

Leclerc needed to cede the place to Albon, but at the same time, his complaint about the amount of rules-lawyering that now accompanies every bit of wheel-to-wheel action is getting a bit tedious. If F1 isn’t careful, the rulebook will end up being too constraining, with drivers playing to the letter even if it’s bad for the sport and the show. And sixth place was still a decent result from 11th; the championships already look out of reach for Ferrari for 2025, but at least it’s in no danger of being overtaken by Williams in the tables, even if that is a threat on track.

McLaren is already at 279 points in the constructors’ championship, 132 points ahead of next-best Mercedes, so the constructors’ cup is looking somewhat secure. Things are a lot closer in the drivers’ standings, with Piastri on 146, Norris on 133, and Verstappen still entirely in the fight with 124 points.

Next weekend, it’s time for the Monaco Grand Prix.