Belgian GP briefing
Mercedes protecting a lead, Ferrari aiming for a second win in a row, Red Bull bracing for more pain - Spa's demands look set to punish whoever's weakest
Verstappen arrives at Spa after a difficult British GP
Not so long ago, Kimi Antonelli had won five of six races and built a 68-point championship lead that seemed to be growing by the weekend.
Going into the Belgian Grand Prix weekend, the Italian’s lead has been cut down to just 25 points after a retirement in Spain and wheel shield failure at Silverstone that turned a probable win into a 16th-place finish.
Spa will be another real test of whether Mercedes can protect what’s left of the advantage Antonelli built.
Ferrari, meanwhile, arrives in cautious mood: fresh off a Silverstone win, yet still openly admitting the SF-26 is giving away real straight-line performance to Mercedes, with Spa flagged in advance as one of the two toughest circuits on the calendar for exactly that reason.
Then there’s Red Bull, and Max Verstappen, arriving at what is essentially another home race after a difficult weekend in Britain that only helped to fuel the speculation about his future.
What to watch out for: Is Verstappen in for more misery?
Spa has long been Max Verstappen territory – a track he loves, near enough to home to bring the Orange Army across the border in force, and a circuit where Red Bull has traditionally found speed.
This year, that reputation might not count for much.
Verstappen arrives at Spa having spun on two consecutive race weekends, both times blaming the same underlying fault: a rear wing that isn’t reattaching properly after a straight-line mode zone.
In Austria, it cost him a shot at victory after qualifying fifth. At Silverstone, it cost him what would have been a fortunate podium, pitching him into the gravel at Stowe.
He didn’t hold back afterwards, calling the wing “super dangerous” and admitting he’d been lucky to escape unhurt twice in eight days.
“I was lucky in Austria, I was lucky here, but that’s why you get really fed up with it,” he said.
Team principal Laurent Mekies has promised to “leave no stone unturned” investigating the fault, and hasn’t ruled out shelving the wing concept entirely before Spa if Red Bull can’t be sure it’s fixed.
But the mechanical gremlin may be the smaller problem. The bigger one is structural, and it isn’t going away by Sunday, as Silverstone exposed something Red Bull will find harder to engineer its way out of in a hurry.
Verstappen didn’t have a great time at Silverstone
Grand Prix Photo
Speaking after the race, Mekies laid out the pattern in pretty blunt terms: “[In Austria], we were fighting for the win. A few days later, here in Silverstone, we were hitting some pretty strong limitations that stopped us from extracting everything out of our package. We think it is compounding with a track like Silverstone. When it’s energy starving, we seem to be struggling more.”
The reality is hard to dress up, as Mekies admitted that on energy-hungry circuits, Red Bull struggles to match its rivals.
On that respect, Mekies said, Spa will probably fall in that category.
It’s a significant admission ahead of a weekend on a track that, under 2026 regulations, may be the most energy-hungry on the calendar – a long, uphill, largely flat-out lap through Eau Rouge and Raidillon into the Kemmel Straight, with comparatively little opportunity to harvest what’s being spent.
If Silverstone’s low-energy demands caught Red Bull out, Spa’s layout could punish the same weakness more severely still.
For a team already fielding questions about whether it can keep Verstappen beyond 2026, arriving at Spa with the car exposed rather than favoured is not the script anyone at Milton Keynes will have wanted.
Who’s under pressure: Mercedes
Six weeks ago, Kimi Antonelli looked unstoppable: five wins on the bounce, a 68-point buffer over George Russell after Monaco.
Since then, the picture has changed fast, and not through pace or Antonelli’s own doing. It’s changed through reliability.
In Barcelona, running second and closing on the lead, Antonelli’s Mercedes suffered an electrical shutdown with four laps to go — his first retirement of the season.
Then came Silverstone, which was worse precisely because it should have been one of his best weekends of the year.
He claimed pole, a sprint win, and had a car that had the pace to catch Charles Leclerc before a damaged front-left wheel shield wrecked the handling, forced two extra stops, and a track-limits penalty completed the damage. It dropped him from what would have been a likely win to 16th and no points.
Antonelli has been his massive lead almost evaporate
Grand Prix Photo
His championship lead, 40 points heading into the weekend, was cut to 25.
Two retirements, or near-retirements, in three races is not yet a crisis, but it’s enough that the story around Antonelli has quietly flipped from how far his run could go to how Mercedes can protect the lead he’s built.
Spa will be another real test of that shift; a long, physically demanding lap where reliability issues tend to be punished harder.
Leclerc’s Silverstone win complicates the picture.
Leclerc took the victory largely on the back of Antonelli’s misfortune and a composed, error-free drive, but Ferrari had claimed Silverstone and Spa would be some of its weakest tracks due to its straight-line deficit to Mercedes.
A win at one of them doesn’t fully change the underlying diagnosis, but it does suggest Ferrari’s gap is not as big as stated.
A Ferrari victory at Spa would say something very different about the rest of the season Mercedes can expect from its main rival.
Historical highlight: The crash that changed Formula 1
Whatever happens with wings and reliability this weekend, it’s worth remembering that Spa’s relationship with driver safety has a much darker chapter behind it; one that changed the sport more than any single race before or since.
The 1966 Belgian Grand Prix was run on the old 14.1km circuit, a track that swept through open countryside and dense forest with barely any barriers and long stretches out of sight of marshals.
The race started dry, but partway through the opening lap the field ran into a sudden, violent rainstorm at the fastest part of the lap.
More than half the cars crashed out before the second lap began.
Jackie Stewart‘s BRM aquaplaned at around 170mph approaching the Masta Kink. He hit a telegraph pole, then a woodcutter’s cottage, before coming to rest in the basement of a farmhouse, his car crushed into the shape of a banana.
Trapped upside down with a broken collarbone and rib injuries, Stewart found the cockpit filling with fuel from a ruptured tank, and no marshals in sight.
His rivals, Graham Hill and Bob Bondurant, both of whom had also gone off nearby, who reached him first.
Unable to free the steering wheel by hand, they borrowed a spanner from a spectator to cut him loose. It took 25 minutes.
John Surtees went on to win the race for Ferrari, but the result barely mattered next to what came after.
Stewart’s crash became the catalyst for a safety campaign that ran for the rest of his career and beyond: seatbelts, full-face helmets, barrier improvements, and the creation of a proper trackside medical response all trace back, in part, to that afternoon.
Stewart later called it the moment “the realisation of the danger hit me,” and said it changed how he approached the sport for good.
“After Spa I realised just how dangerous it really was,” he said. “Like most drivers, I only thought accidents happened to someone else. It was then that I decided to do something to try to make the sport safer.”
