Mark Hughes: Is rain at Spa a recipe for F1 chaos?

The ‘heat dome’ weather Europe is currently enduring might even apply to Spa this weekend. Maybe. The Belgian track is surely the least predictable of all. Last week’s forecasts predicting a wet grand prix have since been considerably downgraded but it would not be surprising for the track’s mini climate to confound all predictions – as it so often has in the past.

Ever since Pierre Gasly did two specific wet weather tests with a ’26-spec car and its massively-enhanced torque and described them as the scariest stuff he’d ever done in his life, F1 has been waiting with some trepidation for how a wet session or race might go with these cars. If it’s going to happen anywhere this season, Spa is by far the favourite (though Austin and Interlagos could be in with a shout too).

Given the high speeds and solid surroundings of the track, we should probably be hoping that any wet running can wait for a few more races, that drivers don’t get their first experience of big torque/low downforce around such a venue.

Furthermore, the traditional Spa choice of high or low downforce is now probably obsolete in favour of low. Historically, with the twists of sector 2 (from Les Combes down to Paul Frere) comprising roughly as much of the lap time as the straights of sectors 1 (start-finish to Les Combes) and 3 (Paul Frere to start/finish), the difference in performance between a very low-downforce rear wing and a significantly bigger one was slight. Typically, the low-downforce option would be slightly quicker in qualifying but slower in the race on account of the tougher time it gave the tyres.

But with these cars trying to spread just 7MJ of electrical energy over 4.3 miles (in qualifying, 8.5 in the race), they cannot really afford the high-downforce option. Yes, the wings run flat on the five straight-line-mode sections but pushing a high-downforce car through the corners on cornering mode will require a lot of energy – especially the fast, long-duration turns of sector 2 here. The extra energy required to push a big-winged car through the corners is energy that won’t be available for the start of the straights. The lap time is in the straights far more than the corners with such massive and instant electrical torque.

So everyone should be more or less obliged to run the skinny wing option. Which makes things yet-trickier if it does rain.

All this of course is what the drivers are paid for. There’s no divine right that they should be in easy-to-handle cars and if it does rain it’s going to be interesting to see how they each manage relative to each other. Some — Max Verstappen, Lewis Hamilton, Nico Hülkenberg, Esteban Ocon — have reputations as wet weather aces, others less so.

In the Thursday press conference Verstappen was recalling how his father Jos schooled him in wet weather driving when he was just setting out in karts. “When I raced in [mini karts], we had no wet tyres, so you had to race with slicks in the wet. It’s quite challenging, but very good, I think, for your control in the wet. I had already practised that since I was four and a half with my dad. We would be driving a lot in the wet anyway. He was showing me the lines. He was standing on the track at a certain place where I was almost hitting him as well, where he had to jump out of the way because I entered the corner a bit too quickly. But that’s how you learn. You have to go off. You have to understand where the grip is or isn’t. It’s a work in progress over all the years. You constantly learn something new, and especially at that young age you make bigger steps. Now, not so much, but when you’re five years old all the way until you’re 12, maybe even 14, you really make big steps in the wet and learn how to manage all these things.”

“I wanted to drift in the wet… Maybe I was watching too much Fast & Furious“

Alex Albon recalled his first wet kart race with glee. In the UK entry-level series they at least were allowed wet weather tyres but, “I remember I wanted to just drift in the wet…
Maybe I was watching too much Fast & Furious as a kid. The final of the race was wet. It was at Rye House, and I was just trying to slide as much as I could. I don’t know why.”

“I guess it went well?” interjected Verstappen.

“Yeah, not too bad,” Albon replied, “but I learned how to drive properly in the wet shortly after that.”

Sitting next to them Ocon – who starred in the wet at Interlagos in his rookie season of 2016 and again in finishing second in the Alpine in the wet 2024 race there – ruefully talked of some of his wet weather karting dices with Verstappen before adding, “I wish he was not there in 2024 so I could have won that race, but unfortunately he was.”

The rain is a powerful randomiser and Spa’s weather in turn can be very random.

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