How Hamilton can still win at Spa

There is no doubt Lewis Hamilton has a mountain worthy of the Ardennes to climb if he is to triumph in this year's Belgian Grand Prix, and extend his four-race winning streak in Formula 1.

No one has ever won a world championship grand prix from the back of the grid. The closest remains John Watson's victory for McLaren in the 1983 Long Beach GP. He started 22nd in a 26-car field.

Hamilton will have to match Watson's feat to taste the victory champagne here.

But Hamilton saw this coming, indeed planned for it. He faces at least a 30-place grid penalty for busting his engine allocation ahead of this weekend's race at Spa, specifically because his Mercedes has now used too many MGU-Hs and turbochargers.

That penalty may rise further if Mercedes introduces more new power unit components - for tactical reasons of increasing Hamilton's available pool of newly upgraded engines for the rest of the season - ahead of Saturday's final practice session.

This means Hamilton will likely start last on the grid for Sunday's race, and it's this simple fact that has the power to turn the Belgian Grand Prix into a tantalising spectacle.

OK, he probably won't win. If everything goes well his Mercedes team-mate Nico Rosberg should. But everyone will want to see how close Hamilton can get to his chief rival starting from so far back. He loves the challenge of racing through the field, and there's a chance the dice could fall his way to make the improbable win possible.

He will perhaps be hoping to draw inspiration from Michael Schumacher's charge to victory from a little further up the grid in 1995. Schumacher started 16th in that race, was 13th after one lap; fifth after six; and into the lead after 16.

It can be done. Watson (who achieved his remarkable win on a street track no less) and Schumacher prove it.

But those were very different times. Cars were much more unreliable, and Schumacher's main rival for victory in '95 (Damon Hill) was also starting part way down the order.

Plus weather conditions were mixed, which can often mitigate for bad starting spots. The weather forecast suggests Spa will be close to melting point for the entirety of this weekend, so Hamilton will have to sweat for every position.

But there are other circumstances that can still pull him into contention.

The extremely high track temperatures combined with high tyre pressures mandated by Pirelli could create serious strategic headaches for the teams.

The super-soft tyre looks as though it can barely last a full lap in qualifying trim, and will not do more than a handful of laps before it starts to give up over a longer run.

Mercedes only has four sets of the softest tyres available to both its drivers here, so avoided using them at all in Friday afternoon's session, but the limited long running completed by the Red Bulls, Force Indias and Sebastian Vettel's Ferrari suggests the super-soft will not be a useful race tyre in temperatures of 30-plus degrees Celsius.

Watson's '83 triumph at Long Beach was aided by a tyre advantage in race conditions for his Michelin-shod McLaren over the Goodyear runners. OK, that was an open tyre formula and today's is a control one. But the way these delicate Pirellis behave on different cars, at different circuits and in extreme weather sometimes creates a similar effect.

Look at this year's European GP, where plenty of teams were bamboozled by the race-day behaviour of the different tyre compounds.

Back to this weekend, and in FP2 Sergio Perez produced a decent average lap time of 1m54.792s over a six-lap run on the super-soft here, but not without a big drop off after two very fast opening laps.

If extreme tyre degradation is seen on Sunday, those who qualify inside the top 10 and have to start the race on the super-soft will likely have to pit very early. If the race becomes torn between two or three pitstops, that could play into Hamilton's hands.

He has already been on the receiving end of such a strategic swing in Austria earlier this year, where teams suffered with tyre graining in cool conditions.

Hamilton started on pole; Rosberg began the race further down because of a grid penalty. He was put onto a different strategy, which ended up leapfrogging him ahead of Hamilton and setting the team-mates on a collision course which exploded into life on the final lap.

Beyond the fact he started way closer to the front than Hamilton will here, three things played into Rosberg's hands that day - slower cars (Jenson Button's McLaren and Hulkenberg's Force India) qualifying unusually high up the grid, tougher opponents such as the Ferraris and Red Bulls further down, and the safety car caused by Vettel's tyre failure.

And the fact grid penalties for rivals allowed Rosberg to start slightly further up the order than he was expecting.

Hamilton is not going to benefit from that, and the unlikelihood of mixed conditions for qualifying stacks the odds further against him.

As does the fact safety cars are a rarity at Spa. Mercedes estimates a 40% likelihood based on historical data. But they do happen from time to time.

This paid off handsomely for Kimi Raikkonen in 2009, when Jenson Button, Romain Grosjean, Jaime Alguersuari and Hamilton all crashed at Les Combes early on in that year's race. Without that interruption Giancarlo Fisichella would have won the race for Force India.

Hamilton's best hope is to go off-strategy and hope that some banzai early laps bring him into contention.

Perhaps he can draw inspiration from a more recent example of Michael Schumacher heroics - back of the grid to fifth in 2011 for Mercedes, 20 years after his stunning F1 debut here with Jordan.

Again the foundation was an awesome first lap, rising from 24th to 14th. But Hamilton may choose to be more circumspect given he's now the points leader and has something significant to lose, and given the fact he suffered damage from a collision on the first lap in China earlier this year, when he last started so far down the order.

Rosberg dominated that weekend in similar circumstances to this, knowing Hamilton would be compromised anyway before engine problems struck in qualifying. Rosberg made it through Q2 without using the softest available tyre, which gave him an enormous strategic advantage in the race.

He eventually won by nearly 40s, but he had some help. Daniel Ricciardo got his Red Bull into the lead at the start and perhaps would have delayed Rosberg more severely without the early puncture that ruined his race.

Should Rosberg attempt a similar strategy here, he again faces the risk of being beaten off the line, or outmuscled on the long run up the hill to Les Combes, where he could be a sitting duck for the cars behind on the first lap.

Mercedes' super-soft tyre-saving in FP2 means we don't know how relatively competitive Red Bull is compared to the frontrunners on pure pace over a single lap. But Pirelli estimates a 1.2s gap between the soft and super-soft compounds, which applied to Rosberg's best lap in FP2 (set on the soft tyre) would put him theoretically 0.124s clear of Verstappen on the fastest tyre.

If the Red Bulls get between Rosberg and clear track out front, they look quick enough to hold him up and perhaps bring the race back towards Hamilton - provided he avoids the sort of booby traps that scuppered him in China.

La Source is a potential pinch-point for first-lap shenanigans, but Spa lacks the bottleneck of Shanghai's early twists, which caught out the Ferraris and Felipe Nasr this year, and led to front wing damage for Hamilton.

Overtaking at Spa is easier than at most circuits on the calendar, which will be a big part of the reason Hamilton has decided to take such a hit on grid penalties here. Provided he keeps his nose clean he should be able to rise up the lower order relatively quickly, enjoying the advantage of that extra Mercedes grunt, which will be arguably more apparent here than at any venue since Baku.

Mercedes utterly dominated there, where - as at Spa - a huge percentage of the lap is spent at full throttle.

Hamilton struggled to rise through the field there, battling tyre and engine problems, so will have to ensure he doesn't become bottled up behind slower runners, which will extract unnecessary extra life from his tyres.

Ferrari could also present a potential roadblock. Based on Friday's times it looks as though it has been sucked back towards Mercedes customer team Force India at this track, which represents a tough compromise between trimming wing off for the extensive straightline sections of sectors one and three (Ferrari's strength), and the high-downforce demands of sector two (Ferrari's weakness).

Hamilton may struggle to pass these cars once he cruises up behind them, but equally it will be very difficult for them to keep him out of DRS range, and Daniil Kvyat showed last year how straightforward overtaking can be on the uphill drag along the Kemmel Straight to Les Combes if you have a tyre advantage over your rivals.

Hamilton spent FP2 focusing on his long runs and race set-up. He may not even try to qualify properly to save tyres. He can set his car up with less of a trade-off than rivals, which should help him storm through the field more easily, and we can expect him to enjoy a tyre-life advantage if this race turns into one of particularly delicate management in sweltering conditions.

The question is whether Hamilton can do enough and get lucky enough to become an eventual factor at the front. Hamilton should at least target a second place finish, and damage limitation to that 19-point championship lead.

In any case this won't be a straightforward race between the two Mercedes men - set up by a Q3 skirmish and won at the start. This could potentially be warfare of a more complex and thrilling nature.

Rosberg should win what Hamilton describes as a "free race" easily, but could find himself in trouble if circumstances conspire against him, he makes mistakes, or suffers reliability troubles of his own.

Mercedes clearly has F1 2016 sewn up, but the dynamic between its two protagonists is very different at this race. One seemingly holds all the aces; the other has the odds of victory stacked massively against him.

But Hamilton thrives on trying to overcome impossible odds, and that should make this race well worth watching.