Oscar Piastri’s second-place finish in the Belgium sprint doesn’t count as his first grand prix podium, but that’s not really the point.
On a wet and wild weekend at one of Formula 1’s most demanding circuits, the Aussie rookie shone brightly to prove not only that he belongs in the sport but that he’s at home at the front.
He’s had everything thrown at him. He had no real practice time on his first visit to the track in an F1 car. The weather has changed constantly from session to session and even minute to minute. He’s been stuck with a car set-up arrived at purely by theory rather than practice.
But he’s taken his chances and wielded his tools to perfection.
If he’s felt the pressure, he hasn’t shown it. Just look at his sprint shootout lap — just 0.011 seconds slower than Max Verstappen.
And having led the first laps of his Formula 1 career, he judged the safety car restart and very brief battle with the much-faster Verstappen as well as he could in his vastly inferior machinery to finish a very comfortable second place.
It’s been clear all year that Piastri has the potential to be something special in Formula 1. There will surely be slip-ups and weekend performances less impressive this season. But in Belgium he turned that potential into something tangible with a genuinely standout performance that got him ahead not only of almost the entire field but also, crucially, his teammate.
“I feel like it‘s going well,” he said, typically understated. “I feel like in a general trend, it’s going in the right direction.
“There‘ll be ups and downs I’m sure but hopefully it’s more ups.”
Could more ups be on the card in the grand prix?
HOW DID OSCAR PIASTRI CHALLENGE MAX VERSTAPPEN?
McLaren has obviously made a step forward with its updates and Spa-Francorchamps is a circuit that suits the car relatively well, but the combination of those two things still shouldn’t have put Piastri so close to Verstappen over a single lap.
But the conditions of this weekend — both the rain itself and the way the weather forced teams into deciding set-up without practice — opened the door just enough to put Piastri on the fast track to the front.
The anatomy of the lap explains everything you need to know about the different way these two cars are working.
Some things we already knew ahead of this weekend: the McLaren is very good at firing up its tyres, which makes it an ace performer in cold and damp conditions.
Another key piece of information is that the RB19 has a super-effective DRS. Knowing that the rear wing flap can be used in qualifying means the team can load up on extra downforce knowing it won’t hurt straight-line speed in the fight for pole.
But race control switches off DRS when it’s wet. Suddenly the RB19 was carrying lots of downforce without that extra boost, bringing it back toward the pack.
The first sector of their respective qualifying laps is all Verstappen. He gets a little boost through the La Source hairpin and powers away from Piastri down Kemmel.
But his speed advantage into Les Combes peaks at only around six kilometres per hour — reduced compared to usual.
Still, by the time he enters Rivage, Verstappen is 0.568 seconds ahead.
But then the McLaren’s strengths — and Piastri’s superb feel for these conditions — comes to the fore.
He’s a gutsy 12 kilometres per hour faster through Pouhon and a massive 20 kilometres per hour up through Fagnes.
By the time he exits Stavelot he’s 0.38 seconds up on Verstappen.
The long flat-out blast to the final hairpin swings momentum back to Red Bull Racing. When they hit the brakes Piastri is around 0.15 seconds ahead, but the MCL60’s slow-speed performance is the nail in the coffin, deciding qualifying in Verstappen’s favour by just 0.11 seconds.
That amounts to a difference of something like 68 centimetres over the 7.004-kilometre lap.
The same characteristics were clear in the sprint race.
The RB19’s superiority in the first sector — which was good enough for more than half a second on the MCL60 in qualifying — was more than enough for Verstappen to slice past Piastri after falling behind at the pit stops.
Passing is seriously unlikely through the middle sector, where Piastri’s advantage diminished with the more temperature Verstappen could pump into his tyres, at which point the car returned to being its unbeatable best.
McLaren will be satisfied it arrived at a set-up that was fast enough to hold second.
But it’ll also be wary that what we’ve seen so far strongly indicates that a fully dry grand prix on Sunday will leave it very vulnerable to other frontrunners in the fight for points.
HAMILTON PENALTY STIRS CONTROVERSY
Lewis Hamilton had risen from seventh to fifth and was pursuing Sergio Pérez for fourth when the pair collided into Stavelot, an incident that changed the complexion of both drivers’ races.
Pérez had been fading, having overheated his tyres trying get past Pierre Gasly. Hamilton was on the attack given his lowly seventh-place starting position after a flawed qualifying session.
A wide moment into the first part of Stavelot opened the door to Hamilton down the inside, which the Briton duly seized upon.
Pérez pinned him onto the apex, giving him just enough room to complete the move, but putting Hamilton onto the kerbs caused the Mercedes to suffer a slide of its own.
Hamilton nudged into the side of Pérez’s car, breaking open the RB19’s sidepod and damaging floor, causing so much performance loss that the team retired the car.
Hamilton continued to finish fourth but was demoted three places with a five-second penalty for causing a collision.
The penalty tallied for Christian Horner, who said the outcome was that Pérez’s afternoon had been ruined.
“Unfortunately the contact left front to sidepod has put a big hole in the sidepod and you lose so much downforce,” he told Sky Sports. “You could see he really lost a huge amount of performance.”
But Mercedes boss Toto Wolff said the penalty risked undermining the purpose of the sprint race.
“This is a sprint race. We want to see them racing, and the argument of the damage isn’t valid because [Pérez] was going backwards before then — massively backwards,” he said, per Autosport.
“They were side-by-side, and yeah, fair enough, it takes two to tango, but it’s a racing incident. For me, that’s pretty clear.”
The stewards were brief in their explanation, saying only that Hamilton was predominantly at fault and thus liable for a penalty.
But some will fairly ask whether Hamilton was punished more for the outcome of the incident rather than the incident itself.
In theory whether Pérez’s car was damaged or not shouldn’t factor into the decision to penalise — only the gravity of the mistake should be judged.
Would Hamilton have been penalised if it had caused only wheel-to-wheel contact? You get the sense that it would have felt far less just.
ASTON MARTIN SUFFERS ITS NADIR AS QUESTIONS SWIRL ABOUT ODD FIA CALL
When conditions are unclear in qualifying, teams always — or should always — fall back onto one golden rule.
Get your lap in.
A banker lap, even on the wrong tyre, is better than having no lap logged at all.
When Lance Stroll crashed late in SQ2 at turn 9 and ended the session early, neither he nor teammate Fernando Alonso had a time to fall back on.
Alonso qualified 15th, his worst result of the year.
Williams was also caught out by the red flag, Albon gambling on one late lap and Sargeant having botched his banker attempt with a spin.
Alonso then failed to finish the sprint after a very rare mistake that put him off the road at the same corner, while Stroll finished 11th.
It was the first event of the year in which the team failed to score points.
There have been questions asked of the FIA’s decision not to declare the track as wet, as would be standard practice.
Race control explained that by not declaring it wet, teams were forced to stick to the tyre rules designed for the shootout — that mediums must be used in SQ1 and SQ2 and softs are required in SQ3.
Did that create a safety concern?
You could argue that’s the case — but you could likewise argue that the track wasn’t ready for slicks if the only slick tyre available was the medium.
Stroll didn’t have to switch to mediums. No other driver did — Albon even sounded surprised any team contemplated it given the sketchy conditions.
The bottom line is Aston Martin and Stroll took a big gamble within the scope of the rules and lost.
It’s only the sprint — a session far less important than the grand prix. But on a weekend team principal Mike Krack has admitted his team has taken a wrong turn on development, a poor Saturday has done nothing to dispel the impression the team is lost in the battle to keep pace behind Red Bull Racing.
HONOURABLE MENTIONS: PIERRE GASLY AND DANIEL RICCIARDO
One day after news broke that Alpine was cleaning out its management ranks following an underwhelming start to the season, Pierre Gasly finally gave the French team something to smile about, taking a third-place finish in the sprint.
Doing so by defending against a hard-charging Lewis Hamilton made the result all the sweeter, particularly after a strong pit stop jumped the Frenchman three places from his starting place of sixth.
It’s only the second time Gasly has scored in any session since Spain and follows a pair of disastrous double DNFs in the past two races for the team, which had it languishing 40 points behind McLaren ahead of this weekend.
A more low key turnaround was also enjoyed by Aussie Daniel Ricciardo, who put his poor qualifying result from Friday behind him with a strong sprint day.
He was a chance for a top-10 start before Stroll’s crash curtailed his final lap of SQ2 and left him 11th, and he was running inside the points for much of the sprint before his rear tyres started giving up near the end of the flat-out sprint.
Having missed the opportunity to go toe-to-toe with teammate Yuki Tsunoda on Friday, Ricciardo had the Japanese driver comfortably covered all Saturday as he continued his adaptation to his new car.
“All in all, I feel progress has been made, so I’m happy with that,” he said.
Tsunoda lamented being unable to string together a clean lap in qualifying, which left him buried in the pack for the sprint, and he then spun to the back of the field following the safety car restart.
Ricciardo will start the grand prix 19th behind Tsunoda in 11th.
