The beady eye of Ted Kravitz spotted that there was fluid leaking from Hamilton's Mercedes as it left the pit lane. The team were confident that it would have no ill effect.
Tsunoda and Verstappen had taken their grid penalties and were starting further back. It might have been interesting to see them move through the pack.
All cars started with medium tyres apart from Sainz playing the long, hard game and Ricciardo going for a punchy, soft start (it didn't work out well for him). Hamilton got a great start and Perez went aggressive to block him off, losing the place. Norris made an awful start and lost two places. With DRS enabled, Hamilton was close to the leader and past LeClerc on lap 3.
As always, when Hamilton is in the lead, the worries started to come. This time he was feeling something moving down by his legs. As always, it came to nothing.
Most drivers took a pit stop within fairly quick succession of each other; apart from Sainz who kept going on his hard tyres, Norris also stayed out as long as possible. There were no big winners or losers and everyone pretty much held position.
The pack stayed close together. Piastri put in the quickest times and was able to overtake LeClerc for a place on the podium with ten laps to go. Determined to make the tyres last a very long time, Russell held on to first place. No one was sure how he had got there, other than one-stopping. His team mate was close behind him and they were allowed to race.
Unusually for Spa, there were no Safety Cars. There was a delight in witnessing a race where you could see all three cars together on the home straight and it was an olden days classic in that we weren't watching Verstappen ten plus seconds out ahead. The lack of a safety car was to be Russell's undoing as he was later disqualified for not having sufficient fuel on board for testing at the end of the race. This was due to using up more fuel than usual, not having any slow laps behind Burt. Russell really celebrated the victory and Spa is one that you would want to win and it was due to his call to change to a one-stop strategy. He danced up to embrace his engineers.
We head into the summer break, Verstappen moved up to fifth from eleventh and Perez went backwards from second to eighth. Will we expect an announcement from Red Bull?
No comments:
Post a Comment