6d ago

2025 Belgian Grand Prix - [SPRINT] discussion thread 🏎️

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

17 comments

Well that was a dull sprint. Lap 1 was all the action there was.
Great start for the Mekies Red Bull era though.
- Antonelli did an overtake after lap 1!
  But yeah that was quite the procession. Good for the Haas
Let's hope we get an appropriate amount of rain tomorrow, because this sprint was just an echo of last year's race here. You'd think it should be easy to overtake here but in reality it isn't. Good lord I hope the next regs will be better for longer.
For once a sprint won't spoil the results of a main race, today we're watching motor racing, tomorrow - boats.
I wonder if Leclerc can challenge Verstappen for a podium, Ferraris had great pace on low fuel this season.
- Please let us have a race tomorrow and not a runback of the 2021 fiasco 🙏
Pretty boring, hope for a bit of rain tomorrow.
2021 monkey paw curls
At least in a proper race, strategy can mix up things so that we might see overtakes. Sprints on the other hand are just DRS-trains circling round.
Maybe they need to think of an additional DRS zone out of Stavelot (T15) so they can't save up the battery for only one big deployment per lap.
- At this point, FOM should know at which circuits sprints tend to work and which they don't. Problem is that they use the sprints for commercial purposes at race weekends where FOM income is low, like in Spa.
- Isn't DRS being removed next year? We'll have to see how overtaking is with the new cars
  
  Oh yeah! You are right. Next year all the cars will open both their wings and a car that comes within 1s of another can deploy more electric power (350 kW IIRC) at higher speeds for a boost, but with limited energy per lap and at any point in the lap, so not limited to zones. Will be a totally different kind of overtaking or defending in the new formula.
That Red Bull is a rocket on the straights, not much downforce on that set-up I bet.
- There wasn’t. They have gone for the low downforce setup this weekend.
Looks like Alpine solved Gasly's water leak issue? He joined the race 2 laps down.
Everyone is calling it a boring sprint but what I'm seeing is that Verstappen held piastri behind and close for fifteen laps.
- It was a flawless sprint from Max, no doubt
Spa once again proving it's a terrible track for actual racing. Can't wait for this snooze fest of a track to be gone.
Excellent overtake by Leclerc there on lap 1.

17 comments