Belgian GP conclusions: Mercedes fireworks? Game over for Perez and Jos Verstappen factor

Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton claimed his second victory of the F1 2024 season in the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa.

Hamilton inherited the win – a record-extending 105th F1 triumph – after Mercedes team-mate George Russell was disqualified due to his car being underweight. Russell’s exclusion promoted McLaren driver Oscar Piastri to second and Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc to third. Here are our conclusions from Belgium…

Conclusions from the 2024 Belgian Grand Prix

Lewis Hamilton vs George Russell: Fireworks for the rest of F1 2024?

For around two hours George Russell was basking in the glory of the most accomplished victory of his F1 career to date. Then he discovered that it all counted for nothing.

And – worse – that win he worked so hard, and driven so beautifully for, had been passed to his team-mate.

Even if this was on Mercedes – the FIA document confirming the disqualification noted “a genuine error by the team” – it would be difficult for even the most placid competitor, let alone one of Russell’s up-and-at-em feistiness, not to feel at least a little resentment about that.

His relationship with Hamilton since he joined Mercedes at the beginning of 2022 can be best described as ‘uneasy’ – as you might expect when the new arrival is portrayed, as Slideshow George was, as his ageing team-mate’s eventual successor.

They have established a productive partnership to haul Mercedes out of their ground-effect hole, yet there has always been a competitive tension – the type of unspoken yet ever-present needle that characterises the most compelling F1 team-mate battles – simmering just beneath the surface.

F1 2024: Head-to-head battles

? F1 2024: Head-to-head qualifying record between team-mates

? F1 2024: Head-to-head race statistics between team-mates

You have seen it this year, most memorably when Hamilton protested in Bahrain that he had chosen a setup geared more towards the race after a limp qualifying performance.

Russell’s response? If anyone’s car in this garage is set up for the race, it’s mine.

They have been relatively easy for Toto Wolff to manage up to now, both working together to bring Mercedes back to the boil.

Yet now the team have returned to a position that allows them to win races on a semi-regular basis once more, how will the dynamic between Hamilton and Russell develop across their last 10 races together?

Certainly, from what we know about George – all-out attack at all times, his “risk/reward dial” (as he called it in Austria) sometimes a little faulty – had their positions been reversed in the closing laps at Spa he may been more inclined than Lewis was to try a lunge for the lead and worry about apologising to the hundreds of people back at base at a later date.

Anyone who seriously thought that Russell would wave Hamilton past, and then use his team-mate’s DRS to defend from the advancing Oscar Piastri, demonstrated a basic misunderstanding of the psychology of the man and Russell’s determination, almost as a matter of principle, to impose himself on every situation.

With Hamilton’s move to Ferrari for F1 2025 made public long ago, a fascinating plot exists here of Merc’s soon-to-be-past and Merc’s future clashing in Merc’s present.

This has the potential to turn quite explosive when F1 returns from its summer break at Zandvoort next month.

Game over for Sergio Perez

The Belgian Grand Prix weekend had the feel of a scenario almost specifically designed to test Sergio Perez’s suitability to the role of Red Bull’s number-two driver, like one of those challenges you might find on the F1 game.

Your team-mate has been hit with a 10-place grid penalty and the team’s hopes at the front of the field rest on you. Watcha got, Checo?

Perez has always responded well in these do-or-die moments – recall that his first career victory, at Sakhir 2020, came when he was still without a seat for the following season – and qualifying on the front row on used intermediates, in the wet conditions in which he has slipped up so often recently, was really gutsy in the circumstances.

Yet at the end of the 44 racing laps that followed on Sunday afternoon, the result did not lie.

From second on the grid to an initial eighth at the chequered flag, he has still not finished higher than seventh since the Miami Grand Prix almost three long months ago.

Too little, too late?

“He completely collapsed,” was the verdict of the good doctor Helmut Marko, picking up the pen to do the writing on the wall himself. The prognosis is not promising.

PlanetF1.com revealed ahead of qualifying at Spa that Red Bull’s plans to replace him are already reasonably advanced, with junior team VCARB holding a shootout test between Daniel Ricciardo and Liam Lawson at Imola on Wednesday.

Decision time is coming…

Daniel Ricciardo and Liam Lawson will go head to head in a shootout test at Imola on Wednesday.

The move comes amid growing doubt over Sergio Perez's Red Bull seat.#F1 #RedBull #DanielRicciardo #LiamLawson #SergioPerez pic.twitter.com/8U4hlzncyu

— PlanetF1 (@Planet_F1) July 27, 2024

It is assumed that whoever comes out on top will become Verstappen’s team-mate for the rest of the season and quite possibly beyond.

Over recent weeks it has gradually become apparent that the two-year contract extension Perez signed just last month was not, as it initially seemed, a sign of Red Bull’s unwavering commitment to him, but the first step towards dropping him at the earliest convenience if he was unable to arrest his latest mid-season slump.

The rumoured insertion of strict performance clauses, chiefly the one that has given Red Bull the freedom to replace him now he is in excess of 100 points behind Verstappen at the time of the summer break (the gap actually stands at 146), has effectively doomed him.

Perez may have thought his future was safe when he put pen to paper on that new contract days before the Canadian Grand Prix.

Yet what he really signed, in fact, was his own exit warrant.

Will Max Verstappen stick or twist over the summer break?

Will Perez’s replacement be the only driver movement at Red Bull during the summer break?

High-level moves involving drivers at the sport’s summit tend to happen like this, all parties denying it and playing it down for months on end, convincing everyone that nothing at all is going on behind the scenes.

Only for the groundshaking announcement to arrive out of the blue one day when you least expect it: Fernando Alonso is leaving Renault, Lewis Hamilton is leaving McLaren, Sebastian Vettel is leaving Red Bull, Lewis Hamilton is joining Ferrari…

Max Verstappen leaving Red Bull for Mercedes? It has never made as much sense as it does today.

There have been a few moments lately when it has hit home just how drastically Red Bull’s landscape has changed compared to this time a year ago – Lando Norris sneaking pole in Barcelona, where Verstappen won by 24 seconds in 2023; a major upgrade bringing no apparent improvement in Hungary.

Add Spa to the list, for at a circuit where he overcame grid penalties to not just win but dominate in 2022 and 2023, this time the upper limit for Max and the RB20 was fifth on the road.

And this on a day Mercedes collected a third victory in four races…

If it is true that Mercedes are rising again, and are looking good to re-emerge as F1’s dominant force when the 2026 rule changes arrive, there is a nagging sense that Red Bull have recently lost something they won’t easily get back.

It has been widely reported that while Verstappen’s father Jos is keen on a move for his son to Mercedes next season, Max himself remains unconvinced for as long as he still has access to a winning car where he is – even if his snappiness with Red Bull in Austria and Hungary hinted at some traces of doubt in his own mind.

The influence of Jos is hugely significant here, for it has been obvious since Max’s earliest days that the only person he has ever really listened to is his father.

Recall, for instance, his justification for refusing to swap places with team-mate Carlos Sainz in Singapore during his debut season with Toro Rosso in 2015.

The reason he ignored team orders, Max said, was because dad “would have kicked me in the nuts.”

And when Max hit his lowest point in early 2018, when journalists were irritating him by asking incessantly if he would “change his approach” and some even suggested he was at risk of being demoted by Red Bull, Jos – not Helmut Marko, not Christian Horner – was the only one who ever stood a chance of getting through to him to turn the situation around.

When Jos speaks, Max listens. Even when he doesn’t necessarily like what he has to say.

And what might Jos be telling him over these next few weeks? That the evidence is stacking up on both sides of the Red Bull/Mercedes debate with each passing race.

And that it is better to jump now, in order to keep the wins and World Championships rolling in over the long term, than risk going over the cliff edge with a Newey-less Red Bull.

No, Ferrari haven’t dropped the wrong driver for F1 2025

Have Ferrari dropped the wrong driver for next season?

Many people have asked that question since the Scuderia announced the signing of Lewis Hamilton back in February.

And it is easy to understand why, when Carlos Sainz’s career peaked with a win for the walking wounded back in Australia and when Charles Leclerc, with the exception of his fine victory in Monaco, has once again largely flattered to deceive.

Leclerc remains a hugely frustrating driver, capable of enormous highs yet still spending extended periods of each year – more time than a driver of his talent and experience really should – getting in his own way.

When it comes to assessing a driver’s ultimate potential, though, it is always more advisable to judge them by their peaks.

And Leclerc, when in the mood and when all is right in his world, can touch heights Sainz just cannot reach.

Exhibit A? His qualifying lap at Spa.

For all his inconsistencies in other areas, Leclerc has always retained the capacity to detonate a bomb right at the end of Q3, an explosion of pace attacking the senses in the form of a blurry flash of red as he takes the car to places it does not deserve.

His poor pole-to-win conversion rate is often used as a stick with which to beat him, yet it is only because his performances so often flatter his machinery in qualifying that the only way is down on race day.

Leclerc admitted after qualifying that he would have considered fifth on the grid a good result before the session started. From an inherited pole position, a first podium since Monaco represented more water being turned into wine.

Leclerc is sometimes described as having a wider palette available to him – a technique more useful and accessible across a broader range of circuits, circumstances and conditions – than Sainz, who has always been more on the spikier end of the driving-style spectrum.

If Leclerc is a more manipulative driver, in the same mould as the Hamiltons and Verstappens of this world, Sainz’s technique is more about abrupt inputs, jolting the car and then reacting to whatever it does.

It does not make Carlos any slower per se, but it does mean he is more susceptible to mistakes – both the big and the small ones that add up over the course of the average qualifying lap – and generally harder on the tyres than Charles too.

As Leclerc headed for third, no moment of the Belgian Grand Prix captured the difference between them better than Sainz running inelegantly into the gravel at the first part of Stavelot shortly before his first stop.

No, this weekend confirmed, Ferrari haven’t dropped the wrong driver for 2025.

It’s time that debate ended.

Why the rest of 2024 is crucial for McLaren’s F1 2025 title hopes

Shall we add this to the expanding list of lost wins for McLaren?

The Belgian Grand Prix felt like their race to lose after Verstappen’s grid penalty was confirmed. And so they went ahead and lost it.

The “very skinny” rear wing, as Max put it, chosen by McLaren had Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri struggling in the wet conditions of qualifying in the hope the rewards would come in the race, yet ultimately it left them with too much to do from fourth and fifth on the grid.

Much has been made of McLaren throwing away win after win over recent weeks, from the ill-timed strategy call in Canada and Norris’s poor start from pole in Spain to the wrong tyre choice for the final stint at Silverstone.

Yet is this not the ideal time for the team – and both drivers – to make all these mistakes?

To learn those harsh lessons now, when Verstappen has what is surely an insurmountable lead in the Championship, and get them out of the way in preparation for bigger battles to come?

There is a parallel to be drawn here between the McLaren of 2024 and the Red Bull of 2009, both ‘young’ teams exposed for the first time to the unique pressures of competing regularly at the front.

Red Bull’s strong second half of the season in 2009 was not enough to overturn the advantage Jenson Button and Brawn GP had established earlier in the year.

But what it did do was instil a sharpness, steeliness and belief within the team, all put to good use for a more complete title tilt in 2010.

In half a season Red Bull went from near-rookies, having only secured their first F1 victory in the early weeks of ’09, to being ready to win the World Championship (only Vettel’s patchy reliability record in 2010 stopped his maiden title-winning year from being one of domination).

Even at the halfway stage of 2024, next year already has the potential to be one of those all-time classic F1 seasons with all the ingredients for the most compelling campaign since 2021.

The narrative is already set: a weakening, Newey-less Red Bull fighting with all their might to contain a McLaren team growing ever stronger and wiser, with an improving Mercedes and Ferrari, energised by the arrival of Hamilton, somewhere in the mix too.

Yet if McLaren are to enter next season with any real confidence of ending Verstappen’s reign, it is crucial that winning starts to become a habit – not just bringing a rare and fleeting high – across the 10 remaining races of 2024.

As with any habit, the more they win, the more practiced they will become at it.

With the fastest car at their disposal, at least at this stage of the season, now is the moment for McLaren to lay that platform and build some serious momentum for 2025.

Now is the time to become fluent in the language of winning.

Read next: How the Belgian Grand Prix definitely proved Red Bull’s RB20 is no longer the best car