Belgian GP: Antonelli heaps more misery on struggling Russell
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The Athletic.
The race is on, and Kimi Antonelli won again at Spa in a race complicated by the timing of the VSC, meaning he had to catch and pass Charles Leclerc. But with George Russell having another tough weekend and ending up in the gravel after a clash with Lewis Hamilton, how big a hit have his title chances taken? I'm Ed Straw, and with me in Belgium are Ben Anderson and Val Harungi. Well, Ben, big day for Kimi Antonelli. Back to winning ways after a few races of not winning, not especially through any fault of his own. 50-point championship lead over his teammate. Hamilton's there in between them. He was the dominant Mercedes driver, had the complexity of catching, passing Leclerc. Just another high-class weekend from Antonelli.
Yeah, the race was not as straightforward as it could have been, but as you mentioned in the intro, that was just a consequence of the virtual safety car. Antonelli did everything he needed to do up to that point.
How did Kimi Antonelli win at Spa and what affected his strategy?
It vaulted Leclerc ahead, but he just relentlessly hunted him down. It was the race, I suppose, that we didn't quite get at Silverstone because of that kerb strike and the damage that his car took after that. This was a clean race, not so many aggressive kerbs either. And, yeah, so it just felt inevitable, I think, that he was going to catch and pass. Even though it was kind of slow to happen, I think because of the energy-starved nature of the track and, as some drivers mentioned, the difficulty of getting an offset with a car that you were racing, you needed a proper pace delta to really make any kind of pass. And ultimately, even though Leclerc looked quite good in the lead for a while, the Mercedes just had that...
crushing pace advantage especially in Antonelli's hands yeah and of course strategically it was complicated by that virtual safety car Verstappen had pitted Antonelli had to then pit in response and that was so on lap 17 Verstappen stopped 18 Antonelli stopped then there was that VSC on lap 20 there was a small window where it could have been a problem for Mercedes and there was a VSC in fact there were two VSCs one briefly happened on 18 but Antonelli by the time he came into the pit lane, the VSC had gone and the VSC came back for some more tidying up.
Or Marshall on the track or something like that, wasn't it? Yeah, picking something up.
I don't think the Marshall was the debris on the track. I think the Marshall was dealing with the... Sweep up the Marshall. Yeah, was dealing with the debris. And then, yeah, Leclerc could take that stop and just had a Norris was there. He was running long on the hards. He wasn't really a factor for the win. Probably talk about whether he could have been a factor for the win later. But it meant Leclerc had to go through Norris and then Antonelli had to go through Norris and they had the battle. But it was... I don't know about you, Val, but it took Antonelli rather a while to catch Leclerc, but it always felt in hand, didn't it? It always felt inexorable progress.
Yeah, and in that first stint, I think a lot of us were wondering before any of the virtual safety car interruptions whether, I mean, that gap that Antonelli had been establishing over Verstappen was representative of what his Mercedes can actually do this weekend. And I think all of us felt that probably not. Probably they can go quicker if they need to. And the second stint, they needed to go quicker. I mean, I don't know if they went... like if they turned anything up relative to the first stint, but certainly it never looked in a massive amount of doubt. I mean, if anything, early laps, you look at how he's gaining and you think, well, is this actually enough? But it quickly turned out that, yes, yes, it is enough that, you know, gradually he didn't need to get the whole chunk of lap time at once.
He actually had older tires as a result, didn't he? Ultimately, because... Slightly, yeah. So that from covering the Verstappen undercut... I should say older. I mean, they're both on the C2 hards at that moment.
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