The message from the Belgian Grand Prix was that Mercedes have returned with a vengeance. Following the disappointment in Hungary when the reigning champions failed to finish on the podium, Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg walked away with Sunday’s race at Spa-Francorchamps.
Looking further into the detail, Hamilton kept Rosberg completely under control to extend his lead of the championship to 28 points. After the summer break, Rosberg needed to come back and beat his team-mate if he was to have any say in this title fight. During the first day of practice, it looked like this might be the case as Rosberg was fastest. But, as we have seen many times before, Hamilton gave serious thought to the set up of his Mercedes and, when it mattered in qualifying, simply blew Rosberg away.
Rosberg did not help his case when he then made a bad start and lost two places. By the time he had got past Daniel Ricciardo’s Red Bull and the Force India of Sergio Perez, Hamilton was eight seconds down the road. Game over.
The fight to be Best of the Rest turned out to be incredibly intense and, for much of the race, Sebastian Vettel appeared to have the best of it, despite starting from eighth on the grid. Vettel worked his way into third thanks mainly to Ferrari deciding to stop the German driver just once, as opposed to the popular option of changing tyres twice.
It may have asked too much of Vettel’s tyres on such a high-speed track but the German driver was furious when a rear tyre exploded with two laps remaining. Had the failure occurred a couple of seconds later, Vettel would have been reaching 320 km/h; a chilling thought he was quick to pass on in public to Pirelli after the tyre company had allegedly failed to advise Ferrari against running such a long stint. Whatever the cause, it was worrying for F1 after Rosberg had also suffered a tyre failure during practice.
Vettel’s spectacular retirement allowed Romain Grosjean to score a first podium for Lotus in more than a year; a timely result in more ways than one as the British-based team worked through the weekend under threat of having the bailiffs come into the paddock to confiscate equipment because of unpaid bills.
If the race produced a welcome surprise for Lotus-Mercedes, the reverse was true for Williams-Mercedes after Valtteri Bottas and Felipe Massa had started from third and sixth. Continuing a disappointing failure to fulfil promise, Williams found that both cars handled badly on the first set of tyres; a problem that had not shown itself during practice.
If that was not enough, the team then made a catastrophic error by giving Bottas the wrong tyres, the Finn emerging from his first pit stop with three of the ‘hard’ tyres and one ‘soft’. It is forbidden to mix tyres, the error bringing a drive-through penalty that helped relegate a deeply disappointed Bottas to an eventual ninth place, three behind Massa.
The only consolation for Williams was that their closest rivals for second place in the championship, Red Bull and Ferrari, each suffered a retirement, Vettel going out with his blown tyre and Ricciardo having lost a certain third place when the hydraulics failed.
In truth, these teams are fighting for scraps falling from the champion’s table. Mercedes, if anything, were even stronger than before the mid-season break as they scored their seventh one-two of 2015 and promised to do the same at Monza in Italy on 6 September.
