How Spa became pivotal in the title race

If Lewis Hamilton goes on to be crowned a four-time world champion this season, he may well look back on the Belgian Grand Prix as the pivotal moment that helped make him the most successful British Formula 1 driver in history.

It is often said championships are won as much on a driver's difficult days as their good ones, and each of the last two F1 seasons have arguably turned on Hamilton's capacity to salvage gold from the gloopy sludge of a competitive setback.

On both of those occasions we can look to the Hungarian GP as the stage for Hamilton's championship acrobatics.

In 2014 he recovered from his car catching fire in qualifying to finish on the podium from the back of the grid, while Nico Rosberg was dealt a rough hand by the timing of an early safety car and ended up reversing down the field to fourth amid a team orders row with Mercedes.

Instead of extending his 14-point championship lead, Rosberg saw it cut to 11. After a summer spent furiously stewing on the outcome, Rosberg drove into Hamilton in the next race at Spa and the rest, as they say, is history.

At the following year's Hungaroring race Hamilton went off on the first lap while following closely behind Rosberg, but Rosberg threw away a potential win via poor tyre strategy and a collision with Red Bull's Daniel Ricciardo (pictured), while Hamilton recovered from his mishap to beat Rosberg to sixth place and extend his 17-point championship lead.

Rosberg never recovered after that. What should have been a great day turned into a bad one, and what should have been an awful day for Hamilton turned out to be pretty decent.

That's not too dissimilar to the dynamic that played out at Spa this year.
Hamilton has been gradually and successfully battling back from those early-season engine woes, turning a 43-point deficit into a 19-point lead coming into Belgium.

But he knew he would have to take a significant hit at some stage, because the way his Mercedes has uncharacteristically munched its way through MGU-Hs and turbochargers means he was bound to bust his engine allocation and have to take grid penalties, effectively gifting Rosberg what Hamilton termed a "free race".

That's why Hamilton felt he was still effectively behind Rosberg in the championship despite finally overtaking him in the points after winning in Hungary in July.

Hamilton suggested he would be best served to take the grid penalties in one hit, exploiting a loophole in the rules designed to prescribe a back-of-the-grid start as the maximum possible penalty for unlawful engine changes, which in actual fact allows drivers hurt by unreliability to stockpile fresh engines.

Mercedes realised this would permit Hamilton to receive three new units at one race, rather than having to try to eke out engine life and potentially compromising his grid position at several races during the championship run-in.

Mercedes picked Spa, figuring this circuit - with its prime overtaking spot on the long uphill drag from Eau Rouge to Les Combes - would represent the best chance for Hamilton to execute some damage limitation.

Knowing he would have to start at the back of the grid, Hamilton came into the weekend expecting it to be a write-off. Yet the way it turned out was anything but.

Rosberg took pole as expected, but not by the expected margin - as Mercedes struggled to extract performance from the W07 in blistering heat, on tyres that team boss Toto Wolff said were "blown up like balloons" according to Pirelli's safety-based mandatory pressure limits.

This restricted the capacity of F1's best car to fully utilise its aerodynamic advantages, and brought it back towards the rest of this field on a track where it should normally have been able to comfortably stretch its legs.

Furthermore the tyres were turning quickly to chewing gum over longer runs in the searing heat, which would only be exacerbated by running in traffic.

All bad news for Hamilton, who said his team was predicting he would finish eighth at best in this race. That would have meant a 21-point swing back to Rosberg - should he win - and a lost championship lead.

As well as his capacity for extraordinary recovery drives, Hamilton needed several things to fall his way to overturn that prediction - a good start, a clean first lap, some chaos further up the order, something to hinder tough opponents such as Ferrari and Red Bull and perhaps a safety car to bunch the field.

Over the course of the first few laps Hamilton got all he needed to pull the rabbit from his proverbial hat.

First Marcus Ericsson's Sauber had to make a pitlane start thanks to a problem with its cooling systems, then the two Ferraris and Max Verstappen's Red Bull immediately came together at the first corner, following a poor start for Verstappen from second on the grid.

Verstappen lunged back inside Kimi Raikkonen under braking for La Source, just as Raikkonen's team-mate Sebastian Vettel turned in from a wide approach.

Raikkonen found himself pincered between two cars. The resulting contact spun Vettel to the back of the field and caused Raikkonen to slice his right-front tyre on Verstappen's front wing.

Raikkonen's tyre let go spectacularly on the run through Eau Rouge, while Verstappen also lost ground over the first lap as his front wing's left endplate disintegrated.

In pretty much one fell swoop three of the five most difficult cars for Hamilton to overtake had taken themselves out of the equation.

Hamilton didn't banzai the start. In fact he lost a place on the first lap to Fernando Alonso's McLaren-Honda, which also started from the last row.

But Hamilton successfully avoided the Ferrari/Verstappen mess, and a further collision between Pascal Wehrlein's Manor and the other McLaren of Jenson Button, to complete the opening lap 15th.

Over the next four he overtook Daniil Kvyat's Toro Rosso and Esteban Ocon's Manor on the track, Felipe Massa's Williams pitted, and he gained a further spot thanks to Carlos Sainz Jr's Toro Rosso suffering a tyre blowout from the first-lap debris.

Hamilton was up to 11th when Kevin Magnussen then crashed his Renault spectacularly at Eau Rouge on lap six of 44.

That incident thrust Hamilton into the top 10, and when the six drivers running ahead who started on the super-soft tyre all dived into the pits while the safety car neutralised the race Hamilton found himself up to fifth and just a handful of seconds off Rosberg's lead!

"It was perfect for me," said Hamilton. "There have been races where I've needed something like that and it's not happened. I definitely wasn't expecting that."

At this early stage it looked as though Hamilton might even challenge Rosberg for victory, but then officials red flagged the race so the Raidillon barriers could be repaired following Magnussen's monster shunt.

This effectively gave Rosberg and second placed Daniel Ricciardo - who both started the race on the soft compound tyre - a free pitstop. They resumed racing on lap 11 having both swapped onto fresh rubber - Rosberg switching to the medium compound, while Ricciardo fitted fresh softs to his Red Bull.

Third placed Nico Hulkenberg made his tyre change just before safety car preceding the red flag was deployed, and made it back out ahead of Alonso and Hamilton.

Hulkenberg remained on his three-lap old softs for the restart, while Alonso and Hamilton both took the opportunity to ditch their medium starting tyres for fresh softs.

Hamilton made short work of Alonso's underpowered McLaren-Honda, but took until lap 18 to make his way past Hulkenberg. That took too much life from Hamilton's soft Pirellis and meant he couldn't bridge the six-second gap to Ricciardo's Red Bull.

"I was already in the points, which was great, so it was just a case of seeing what I could get," said Hamilton. "Of course the thought [of winning] crossed my mind, but I was also conscious the gap was already quite big to Nico.

"He was having a Sunday drive. He didn't have any stress from anyone and was gone by the time I'd got past the Force India and Fernando, so at that point I was just trying to fight for as many points as possible."

Hamilton dived for the pits for a second stop on lap 21 and fell back into the pack again, while Ricciardo was able to extend his second stint to lap 25 before switching to the medium tyre.

Ricciardo emerged with a couple of seconds still in hand over Hamilton, and crucially with a tyre that could potentially get the Red Bull to the finish without stopping again.

Rosberg had enough of a buffer over Ricciardo to allow Mercedes to pit Rosberg for another set of mediums and rejoin with his lead intact. He could now also go to the end, while Hamilton would certainly have to make a third stop.

There was a suggestion Mercedes should perhaps have fitted mediums to Hamilton's car at his second stop - to put him on the same two-stop strategy as the leaders and give him a chance to take Ricciardo on in a straight fight.

Pirelli recommended the medium tyre should not be run for more than 24 laps, so given Hamilton's second stop came on lap 21, a 23-lap final stint on that compound was theoretically possible.

But Rosberg had only done 17 laps on mediums following the restart, so Mercedes couldn't be sure Hamilton wouldn't run out of rubber regardless.

Mercedes committed Hamilton to a three-stop strategy, but he could not extract enough from that second set of softs, or his final set of mediums, to overturn the disadvantage of making an extra stop.

HAMILTON VS RICCIARDO GAP - FINAL STINT

HAMILTON VS ROSBERG GAP - FINAL STINT

Hamilton enjoyed a decent final stint, but ultimately was never going to deny Rosberg victory if Rosberg enjoyed a trouble-free race, and the only way Hamilton could possibly have beaten Ricciardo was in a tyre-management marathon that Mercedes ultimately refused to enter him into.

Given its struggles with high tyre pressures throughout the weekend, and Red Bull's relative strength over longer runs, perhaps that was no surprise. But meeting his team-mate and title rival on the podium after the race was certainly a big surprise for Rosberg.

"After the chequered flag I looked at the results on the big screen," he said. "I knew Daniel was behind me, and then I saw 'HAM' in P3. I was like 'what, seriously?!'."

Not only has Hamilton seriously limited the damage to his title ambitions with this result, he's also turned his engine situation around. As well as a nine-point championship lead, Hamilton now has a greater number of fresher power units than his rival available to use for the rest of the season.

The only thing that could scupper him now is another Mercedes engine upgrade, which would require Hamilton to take a further grid penalty to take the benefit. Mercedes has six tokens left to spend on development in 2016, but has not yet seen a proven performance gain on the dyno. Hamilton will probably be hoping it stays that way.

"The fight's back on as far as I'm concerned," said Hamilton. "If someone had said going into the break 'you're going to lose 10 points in the next race but take three new engines, are you OK with that?' I'd have said I'd take it, so I'm very happy."

He'll be even happier if he can use this springboard to leap onward to a third consecutive world championship win. This could easily have been one of Hamilton's worst races of 2016, but ultimately it was the sort of salvage job he's made a specialty of his in recent times.

It wasn't achieved with the same swashbuckling brilliance we've seen in the past - this was definitely a race of luck as much as judgment for Hamilton. But it's often said that you also need luck to win a world championship, and it increasingly seems as though Hamilton's luck has turned in the right direction.