(Motorsport-Total.com) – Those who thought Silverstone was already bad experienced a new, downright ridiculous low point at Spa-Francorchamps, one of the most traditional racetracks in Formula 1. But grotesque lapses in competence are by no means unfamiliar to this venerable track.
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Let’s think back to 2021 – a race that, thanks to rain (in Spa? Who would have thought!), only started at a time when decent people already had their Sunday roast in the oven. And then only for a few laps behind the safety car before it was said: les jeux sont faits (French: The dice are cast). Refund? Keep dreaming, folks!
And then there was, of course, the 1985 Belgian Grand Prix. The organizers had, in their boundless wisdom, decided to resurface the track with an untested, experimental asphalt just ten days before the race.
And they promptly got the trouble: the new surface broke up, the entire event had to be prematurely canceled on Saturday afternoon and postponed to another date in the year. The spectacle of the 2026 race weekend now fittingly joins these inglorious chapters of history.
Watching a Formula 1 car with maximum downforce race at the limit through the double-left corner “Pouhon” used to be one of the most intense experiences a Formula 1 fan could have. For that, one even accepted the capricious microclimate of the Ardennes and the rough security personnel who always seemed to be just waiting for an opportunity to unleash their dogs on the spectators.
With the current cars, Pouhon is now driven flat out without problems – but not because the downforce is so great, rather because the batteries have long since used up their electrical energy on this section of the track. The best drivers in the world now just roll their eyes, downshift, and wonder how it came to this.
“I think no one out there enjoys the qualifying lap as much as last year,” pondered Carlos Sainz over the weekend. “It’s obvious that we have lost quite a bit with these cars in Spa. Still, I don’t want to constantly badmouth my own sport because that doesn’t help anyway.”
“I think we all know that this is not good enough. Whoever saw these simulations in 2022 and 2023 and didn’t immediately think: ‘How can we even accept something like this?’ – they really need to question what happened. This should never have happened.”
Spa: Driver ratings by Marc Surer and the editorial team
The rights holders’ reaction over the weekend was, as always, to activate the “Nothing to see here” mode. During free practice, the TV world picture rarely showed onboard footage of cars passing the track sections most affected by super-clipping and co.
Therefore, the question inevitably arose already on Friday how a complete race would be broadcast if, for example, the cockpit perspective can only be switched on at the 50-meter sign of the Bus Stop chicane.
After qualifying, Formula 1 did not miss the chance to share the complete onboard lap of polesitter Antonelli on social media – but noticeably without the usual graphics for speed and battery charge status.
There are only a few things in this world more obvious than drunk people trying to sneak into a house as inconspicuously as possible. But respect to Formula 1 for brazenly testing the limits of what’s possible.
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Antonelli’s pole lap was 1:44.361 minutes – almost four seconds slower than the pole time from the previous year. Lance Stroll’s “Hopefully-that’s-enough” qualifying lap in the miserable Aston Martin AMR26 was 1:50.177 minutes. The Formula 2 pole time by Rafael Camara was 1:56.306 minutes.
That an Adrian Newey car would be closer in pace to the product of an increasingly pointless spec chassis series than to a genuine Formula 1 car was not on this author’s bingo card for 2026 – but that’s how life goes.
Photos: F1: Belgian Grand Prix (Spa) 2026
Maybe it really is time to introduce a Formula 1.5 category. But the most frightening thing was that we once again witnessed a race where only the driving skill of the pilots saved us from a catastrophe.
“I expected Kimi Antonelli to come past. Then I looked in the mirror and only saw a red rocket [Charles Leclerc] flying towards me,” Max Verstappen described the chaotic approach to Les Combes in the first lap.
“I just thought: ‘Oh, I better just hold my line because if I move over now, we’ll have a plane crash here.’ It was really incredible what kind of [speed] differences there were. Welcome to Formula 1 2026. Sometimes it really is a jungle.”
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When drivers can hardly control their cars anymore because opaque machine learning algorithms determine when and how much electric power is released, then a reckoning is probably only a matter of time.
British TV viewers could choose on Sunday afternoon between the Belgian Grand Prix on Sky Sports F1 and the celebrity special of “Deal Or No Deal” on ITV – a show that ultimately is about guessing the contents of a box. In the long run, the latter is probably the cheaper form of entertainment.
“It’s annoying,” said Oscar Piastri – and he didn’t mean the TV program on Sunday, but the powerlessness of the drivers to make any difference at all when software determines how much energy they are granted.
“I really can’t put it any other way … but if starting grids in qualifying depend on whether computers behave or not, then that’s a pretty shitty way to race.”
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