Martin Brundle column: On the Belgian GP and Ferrari’s pained fall
3:01 Daniel Ricciardo finished a fine fourth at Spa and was pleased to pick up the fastest lap late on
It was a very welcome and well-earned result for the team.
Alex Albon finished sixth, some 27 seconds behind his bored team-mate Verstappen, having been passed late-on by Ocon. It was a result which the remarkably supportive Red Bull team will inwardly continue to be concerned about.
It seems Pierre Gasly is not a candidate for yet another swap around within the Red Bull gang but he drove an impressive race to eighth and collected ‘driver of the day’ from the fans. He really is getting the most out of the car and was so unlucky with the timing of the lap nine safety car, having started on hard compound tyres.
Just ahead of him was Lando Norris for McLaren, who once gain drove a great race especially in the closing stages where he often seems to wind up into ever-increasing speed. When he can deliver that progress all race long he will be ready to contend for a championship like Hamilton does.
For all the furore and potential legal case about the Racing Point car being a clone of the 2019 Mercedes it is not actually going so well lately. Once again, despite a safety car closing the pack, they finished 53 seconds behind the works Mercedes in ninth for Lance Stroll and 10th for Sergio Perez, who curiously was not pitted to dispose of his soft tyres under the safety car, but charged through nicely thereafter. Their 2018 and 2019 Spa results were better.
Seventy-three seconds behind the winner was the first works Ferrari in 13th place of the 17 finishers. That would likely have been 14th had Carlos Sainz’s McLaren not failed going to the grid. And that is the kind of pace Ferrari truly had all weekend, having won the race from pole position last year.
Whatever they were doing with the power unit last year which had to be stopped, and we are not allowed to know about, has decimated their performance. But that does not explain how Kimi Raikkonen, similarly powered in an Alfa Romeo run on a much smaller budget, passed and stayed ahead of Sebastian Vettel.
It is as if Ferrari have been sent to the back of the class for bad behaviour, but their car should still be faster than Alfa.
Charles Leclerc has been outperforming his Ferrari of late but not on this particular Sunday. It was painful to watch and not at all what F1 needs.
There’s enough money in F1, and hopefully structure with the new running budget cost caps in 2021 and new cars in 2022, to have a grid of 20 cars covered by less than a second. We have to close the pack for our healthy future in F1.
The next two races in Monza and Mugello could well be purgatory for Ferrari.
2:16 Sky Sports F1’s Anthony Davidson analyses Antonio Giovinazzi and George Russell’s crash in the Belgian GP
We saw a nasty crash when Antonio Giovinazzi lost the back end of his Alfa Romeo for the second consecutive year and whacked the tyre barrier. His rear wheel along with some suspension parts broke loose and headed into the path of George Russell and the impact was severe, but thankfully only the cars were damaged.
Each corner has suspension tethers which fundamentally do a good job year round of containing flying wheels, but they cannot be infinitely strong otherwise they would be impossibly heavy, and also if a wheel got trapped in some kind of trackside furniture during a high-speed crash then the survival cell would be taking all the deceleration instead, which would not end well.
Sourse: skysports.com
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