Charles Leclerc wins to shine a light on dark Belgian GP weekend
It was a challenging weekend for everybody at Spa. What should have been a joyous and exciting return in the month of summer vacations turned into a heartbreaking and sombre weekend where the Formula 2 driver Anthoine Hubert was fatally injured in a accident on Saturday evening.
If you didn’t know himAnthoine Hubert had been also a rising star on the ladder to transplant 1. His Father Francois was a rally driver but Anthoine took to the race track winning the F4 title.
Drivers: We raced for Hubert
The Frenchman won the GP3 Championship last season and was rewarded with a contract using the Driver Academy of the Renault F1 team. Anthoine graduated to F2 and impressed winning Monaco and on home soil in France, and has been in line to get a seat with a few of the top teams in the F2 show for second year.
I personally didn’t really know Anthoine – I had met him a couple of times in the paddock with a few friends, but he was a popular and lovely young man. I had been interviewing Charles Leclerc after Qualifying in the Skypad as soon as the accident happened and neither of us knew how terrible it was or in fact that it turned out to be a friend of his who was involved. You were advised by the response from greats like Alain Prost and Lewis Hamilton we are these days once we lose a driver.
There were a lot of people of the paddock – even in our Sky F1 group – and on societal media who wondered how motorists can continue driving through the same corners and accepting the exact risks. This ability to detach from the world when you put your helmet on and focus is exactly what makes drivers unique.
In which someone has been killed, I’ve been fortunate that in 18 decades of driving race cars, I have only once been involved in a race. This was Allan Simonsen at Le Mans in 2013 and that I recall hearing about it as I had set my helmet on and get in the vehicle and also my team-mate Brendon Hartley came to change . The simple fact that I had to push away and keep focussed for another 22 hours meant I – and all the drivers in the race – managed to continue driving flat out we took.
It’s a defence mechanism that their brain is engaged in by all drivers. That feeling of’it won’t occur to people’ but every so often, tragically the sport reminds us of the dangers lurking just around the corner.
If you talk with Sir Jackie Stewart regarding the age he hurried in, he will tell you losing friends and competitions almost on a monthly basis wasn’t uncommon and it’s thanks to people like the FIA that people have not lost as many motorists in recent times. There will be a complete evaluation of course and there will be lessons which every person is able to learn but sadly motor sport is dangerous and each and every motorist – Anthoine included – accepts the dangers every time we put into the cockpit of a racing car.
In terms of the Grand Prix it had been fantastic to visit Charles Leclerc eventually get. He has driven beautifully following the chance of losing wins in Baku Bahrain and Austria during this season and all, it was good to see him finally get one online. Charles was catastrophic in Qualifying, beating his World Champion team mate for the sixth successive Qualifying and this time by a significant seven-tenths of a second.
At the race that he was able to split with far much better tyre administration and pace apart from Sebastian. It turned out to be a powerful performance but it got a little tricky in the end when Hamilton began to shut the gap down.
Mercedes ran more downforce and of course made it hard for them to overtake. It meant so we needed a cat and mouse game in which one car was faster than the other that they had great speed from the sector of their lap.
There is not much more that Mercedes could have done – possibly a clean stop one lap earlier would have reduced the deficit to Leclerc by a couple of seconds but it is not actually a race which they can be criticised by you .
Vettel appeared to endure from tyre degradation more than his youthful team-mate and also I wonder if maybe Ferrari could have attempted to run somewhat more downforce simply to assist him at the twistier centre sector of the lap since the benefit they had about the full power run during the first sector was absolutely enormous.
Ferrari should have more of an edge, As soon as we visit Monza next weekend. There are less corners than we have just a few corners which is the point where the front end grasp of this Mercedes is really a step that is fantastic greater than the cars that are red. They’d have to do week something quite wrong to not deliver a victory before the tifosi!
Lando Norris was unlucky not to find a fantastic effect in 5th while the location was inherited by Alex Albon after a fantastic push from 17th on the grid at the conclusion. The Thai driver did a great job on his first outing with the team – he had been less than three tenths slower than Max Verstappen in Qualifying before he donned his lap in the conclusion on account of the grid penalties that turned out to be an excellent effort for his first session in the vehicle.
At the race, he then made strong improvement in the second half to set a career best outcome and bided his time on.
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