ROUND 13: 🇧🇪 Belgium
FORMULA 1 MOËT & CHANDON BELGIAN GRAND PRIX 2025
Circuit stats
- First Grand Prix: 1950
- Number of laps: 44
- Circuit Length: 7.004 km
- Race Distance: 308.052 km
- Lap record: 1:44.701 Sergio Perez (2024)
- 2024 winner: George Russel
Track Map
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I know I’m opening a controversial topic here, but are we erring too much on the side of caution in modern F1? I’m not saying we should go back to the sixties and have multiple drivers die every season, but motorsports are inherently dangerous and shouldn’t there be a level of acceptable risk that is higher than zero? Maybe I’m a psychopath, but I feel like we could trust the drivers a bit more. Surely we could have started this race 20 minutes earlier? There were dry patches showing when they started doing laps behind the safety car for fucks sake!
Anyway I don’t have too much to say about the race itself honestly. I’m mostly feeling disillusioned about the state of things. I feel bad for all the drivers that went to a wet setup.
Also I’ve already opened controversial doors this comment so fuck it, it needs to be said: is Spa just a bad track for modern F1?
I think they want to be especially cautious at Spa, given that this track is responsible for multiple deaths in recent years (Anthoine Hubert, Dilano van 't Hoff) and major injuries (Jack Aitken in GT3).
They definitely could try out more things in general though, like sending out the safety car to do reconnaissance laps on the conditions earlier. Apparently during the first lap before the start was aborted, a lot of drivers complained about visibility though so you can argue that they were trusting the drivers judgements.
It’s possible Spa has an extra level of caution associated with it, that’s true.
I thought race direction was on the money today. I’ve no interest in stop start races or races with endless safety cars. F1 causes too much spray and if the drivers can’t see you can’t really justify a race with an acceptable level of risk. The only way we would get wetter races is with a complete redesign of the cars, which would probably lower the performance so much that it just wouldn’t be F1 anymore.
You can have cars with different aero than ground effect and still be fast. The spray problem isn’t an inherent “F1 problem”, it’s a problem with the current regs. We’ve had other regs that were equally fast but created less spray.
But even accounting for that this was a farce in my opinion. It was so dry when we eventually green flagged that people had to immediately actively look for wet patches off line to cool the inters and first reports of them overheating came on lap 2. Hell, we had a “wet race” with no Yellow flag, no retirement, no big moments from anyone and barely even anyone going off track.
We’ve had wetter races this season and it’s been fine, but I guess being at Spa makes race control panic.
Compared to just five years ago, they have been more risky during this and last season. We’ve seen more standing starts for example and just a few weeks ago in Silverstone we saw a crash at Copse corner (Hadjar rear-ended Antonelli) because visibility was so bad. At Spa, after multiple fatal accidents at the same corner over recent years, yes absolutely they’d rather err on the side of caution.
Ngl i thought the race today was a bit boring. Yes Hamilton did work and my boy hulkenburg was doing well, but overall i just wasent invested with this race for some reason. Maybe its just me but what do i know…
Pretty meh race in the end, once again we had to wait too long to restart so it was basically ready for slicks straight away. Once everyone had put the slicks on it was pretty clear that a one stop was possible. Was there a reason Hulk pitted? Seemed like a really dumb move at the time.
Fastest lap during the race for Antonelli. Hopefully that will help his confidence.
