Lewis Hamiton’s pole position lap for the Belgian Grand Prix was amazing. His commitment was total and the car grip backed it up. Sometimes you just have to say congratulations to everyone involved in achieving that because it’s not an easy task, but weekend after weekend Mercedes as a team achieved it.
Hamilton was simply in a different league, especially compared to his team-mate. Valtteri Bottas is in the same car, with the same potential power unit performance and it must feel like having the rug pulled from underneath your feet every weekend.
You have just put in what you consider to be a mega lap and then you find out you are half a second slower than your team-mate. It’s not easy being in the same team as a great driver.
The progress, or lack of it, through the three stages of qualifying is always revealing. I’m going to compare the two Mercedes drivers and also look at the fastest drivers from the other teams in Q3 to see the total gains across qualifying. Here, they are ranked in pace order.
Improvement Q1 to Q3
Hamilton – 1.071s
Bottas – 0.771s
Verstappen – 1.419s
Ricciardo – 1.248s
Sainz – 0.884s
Perez – 0.817s
The improvement from Q1 to Q3 shows the real picture when things get serious and the order of merit changes slightly. If we re-order according to the size of the gain, it shows the impact of the driver as I believe they are the ones that influence the size of improvement even more than the engine modes.
Today at Spa it was a bit like Noah’s Ark with 10 drivers in five different teams in Q3, so the qualifying approach should be the same across both cars. Here’s how they rank based on improvement.
Improvement Q1 to Q3
Verstappen – 1.419s
Ricciardo – 1.248s
Hamilton – 1.071s
Sainz – 0.884s
Perez – 0.817s
Bottas – 0.771s
This shows who has the capacity to dig deep when it is required, and in this case it is Bottas that fell away. This accounted for much of his half-second deficit to Hamilton, despite what the Finn believed was a relatively error-free final attempt – compared to his mistake at La Source on the opening Q3 run.
“I don’t think I got my tyres warm enough on the out-lap [on the first run],” Bottas said.
“So, at the end it was down to the second run. I knew everything was still possible, and it was a clean lap. Not maybe the best Turn 1 but it was OK, and otherwise the lap was nice and clean and really felt like I was pushing the limits.”
That’s not really the description you’d expect for a lap 0.511s off the pace, but it just shows how much Hamilton excelled. If we want closer racing, forget about regulations or race formats etc – just get all the drivers to club together and pay Hamilton to retire early…
