The surprise star of Verstappen’s latest Spa masterclass

“I was surprised it took him so long to get to the front to be honest with you,” Red Bull boss Christian Horner joked in the aftermath of Max Verstappen’s second crushing Spa comeback drive in two years, his victory in the 2023 edition of the Belgian Grand Prix again coming ahead of team-mate Sergio Perez.

He might have only started sixth and not on row seven – his lowly grid spot thanks to a gearbox change grid penalty this time and not one stemming from an engine replacement – but this was surely just as impressive as Verstappen’s 2022 Spa steamrollering.

The description might be similar, but there is, however, plenty to explain following Verstappen’s 10th 2023 GP victory, plus his second sprint sweep of this campaign. That concerns not only why Verstappen was so good last Sunday, but also the key weakness shown by Perez that cemented his defeat against his squad-mate, plus outlining the race’s surprise other star in their wake.

Perez had started alongside inherited polesitter Charles Leclerc of Ferrari and was armed with an RB19 that is just perfectly suited to Spa. This season’s dominant machine rides the bumps beautifully with its unruffled ride, shimmies down the straights so smoothly with its slippery aerodynamic profile and doesn’t lose its balance in either the 4.35-mile track’s high-speed or low-speed stuff. Such might breeds confidence, but Perez still felt “it was quite crucial for my race to get Charles on lap one”.

That explains his urgency running up the Kemmel straight for the first time of 44, shooting into the Ferrari’s slipstream as they blitzed Raidillon’s kerbs, then blasting by on the outside run to Les Combes, after Leclerc had defended the inside run to La Source. Perez quickly rocketed to a 1.3-second leading margin by the end of the opening tour.

By this point Verstappen was 2.4s off the lead but already up to fourth. His progress had been eased by Carlos Sainz and Oscar Piastri colliding their Ferrari and McLaren machines at La Source’s apex, after the former had locked his right-front hard jostling behind Lewis Hamilton and the top two.

While Sainz and Piastri tangled, Verstappen steered clear to gain two spots at the first corner

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

“You have to wait and see what they're going to do on the exit, because I could see Oscar couldn't really steer anymore,” Verstappen later explained after recalling his similar clash with Kimi Raikkonen knocking into Sebastian Vettel seven years ago here. He was briefly caught behind the suddenly slow McLaren on the downhill plunge to Eau Rouge.

“So, we lost a little bit of momentum there but luckily, it was all OK,” continued Verstappen. “I also got Carlos into Les Combes. And, from there onwards, basically, my race started.”

Over the next four laps, as Perez was gradually building a nice lead up front, Leclerc was gamely holding on ahead of Hamilton, with Verstappen lurking menacingly. But, to Horner and everyone else’s surprise, the Dutchman wasn’t harrying and attacking his 2021 title rival. Instead, Verstappen spent those laps, “stuck behind Lewis, because he was in the DRS of Charles, and with Lewis having the highest top speed this weekend, it was just impossible to pass”.

But on the fifth tour, Hamilton dropped out of Leclerc’s DRS range. And Verstappen didn’t hesitate. Immediately the Red Bull was all over the Mercedes, then on the Kemmel straight on lap six Verstappen roared by. It wasn’t long before he was making similarly light work of Leclerc – getting by and into second with a sweeping outside line run up the Kemmel straight on lap nine. Up ahead Perez held a 3.0s lead, the stage set for an intra-Red Bull battle.

Perez had completed seven long laps on his brand new mediums when the rain arrived. The track temperature briefly dipped then and this combined with his off onto the damper run-off to cause Perez’s yellow-walled mediums to lose more temperature than his team-mate’s

Over the next four-lap mini-segment of the action, Verstappen did start eroding his team-mate’s advantage but only a little. He was 2.5s in arrears at the end of lap 12 of 44. There were two reasons for this.

One was Verstappen feeling he’d “hurt my tyres a bit too much” in his early chase and then passing moves against Hamilton and Leclerc – by this time Leclerc was already 6.2s adrift in third. The other was the cryptic message Verstappen was receiving from the pitwall. Here, his engineer Gianpiero Lambiase – gaining ever more fame with every deadpan, cool reply to his charge’s team radio angst and fury – was telling him to “use your head”.

“Are we both doing it or what?” was Verstappen’s angry response. The two Red Bulls were lapping in the high 1m52s, but this exposed for the first time Red Bull’s concerns about inducing graining on its front tyres and possibly falling into the clutches of its rivals behind. Given there had been no dry practice on heavy tanks thanks to FP1’s full soaking, the team was right to be concerned.

As it was, Pirelli saw “no graining” on any of its tyres, per its motorsport boss Mario Isola. And the rubber manufacturer also reported that tyre degradation was “quite in line with our expectations”. If anything, it was slightly less than expected, given Pirelli had predicted pre-race that the quickest strategy would be a soft/medium/medium two-stopper.

Hamilton kept Verstappen at bay in the early laps while he still had DRS from Leclerc but soon bowed to the inevitable

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

That number of services was what Red Bull had in mind, but it was also monitoring, as was everyone else, a rain shower approaching from the two Stavelot corners at Spa’s south-eastern edge. After Red Bull pitted Perez to change the softs he and the other leaders and started on for mediums, Lambiase asked Verstappen if he could stay out for another “nine or 10 minutes” and possibly stop for wet tyres if the deluge was heavier than the light sprinkling expected.

“I can’t see the weather radar, can I?” came the terse reply. And so, on lap 14, Verstappen got the same treatment as the leader. In fact, his pitstop was 0.7s quicker after Perez’s service featured a sparky right-rear change.

That helped cut Perez’s lead down to 1.1s by the end of Verstappen’s out-lap and the next time by he was finally in DRS range. On lap 17, Verstappen raced around the outside up the Kemmel straight and overtook the other RB19 with ease, and Perez “obviously didn't defend too hard because of the speed difference between the two of them” thanks to Verstappen’s open DRS, per Horner.

Verstappen then pulled a 3.9s lead over the next two-and-a-third laps. Then, danger. The rain had arrived.

On lap 20, the leader’s lap time tumbled from the 1m51s to a 1m55.733s. Then the next time up Eau Rouge, Verstappen’s race was nearly ended in shocking fashion. His RB19’s rear stepped out of line at Spa’s most fearsome spot. He lifted off as he corrected the steering lightning fast, thinking “a swear word” he would soon be uttering to Lambiase.

“The rain was just moving around on the track,” Verstappen said of this breathtaking moment of jeopardy. “Like sometimes it was just increasing in other places, from lap to lap.

“I got there and it just caught me out. It was just a bit more slippery than I thought it would be. It happens, you quickly try to correct it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Luckily, at that speed as well, you have quite a bit of downforce on the car. That helps.”

Running 9.8s in Verstappen’s wake but with a 3.1s advantage over Hamilton (this pair also now on the mediums having stopped on laps 13 and 12 respectively), Leclerc had a similar moment on the same lap. Unlike Verstappen, his SF-23’s rear did not step out so spectacularly, but he was sent shooting off-line and climbing Raidillon’s inside kerbs riskily.

Verstappen survived a scary moment at Spa's most treacherous corner when rain came, but still moved away from Perez in this phase of the race

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Neither driver was unnerved by the incident. Verstappen’s lead had briefly fallen to 3.6s but he quickly started building it back up again as he just romped clear of Perez. It was here that the race result was ultimately sealed.

Perez had had his own moment of peril in the precipitation – running very wide onto the vast Pouhon run-off on lap 22 and losing a second to Verstappen. Before his second stop on lap 29, the Mexican driver’s gap to the leader swelled to 8.9s. There was no coming back.

“I did struggle quite a bit on that medium tyre, especially with the rain,” Perez explained. “Felt like I lost a bit of temperature on it. We never really got a good read on that tyre.”

Although his mediums were brand new when he took them at his first stop, Perez had completed seven long laps when the rain arrived. The track temperature briefly dipped then and this combined with his off onto the damper run-off to cause Perez’s yellow-walled mediums to lose more temperature than his team-mate’s up ahead. On thinner, worn Pirellis, that heat just won’t come back.

Ferrari’s only remaining runner once the sidepod-damage-addled Sainz had slipped down the order and into retirement during the shower, performed much better than expected. Leclerc was able to break Hamilton’s DRS range early on, then didn’t slip back into it

There was still a stint to complete, as Pirelli’s two-stop prediction became reality for most. But the hard compound never got a look in other than McLaren fitting it to Lando Norris’s MCL60 for his second stint, which set up his mammoth 27-lap final run on the softs.

Norris and others could contemplate long soft final stints because “the hard was not really the compound considering the cold conditions and the condition of the track” – according to Isola. The rain and tyre temperature performance considerations made it even more unattractive.

“When it was raining, this was also helping the soft compound to last longer compared to what was predicted,” Isola added. “So, a bit of pace management, plus condition of the track and obviously they were slowing down the pace, running in 1m55s or 1m54s. That was the reason why the stints on the soft were extended.”

The leaders had managed to get their softs through longer opening stints than those behind, even while on heavy tanks. It was only logical, therefore, that they’d go back to that compound for the final stint. But Red Bull’s hand here was in fact forced by its closest chasers. Leclerc was called in by Ferrari for a second time on lap 28, one lap after Hamilton had stopped to go back to the softs.

Leclerc kept the heat on Perez which ensured the leaders all followed the same strategy

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

“Our strategy was based on Lewis and trying to keep him behind during the whole race,” Leclerc explained. “He had a good pace, but I felt we had him under control.”

Indeed, this was surely the most surprising element of last Sunday’s race. While the team running in second to Red Bull has varied from track-to-track, Mercedes had been confident it would be able to be the one in that position in Belgium.

But in fact, Ferrari’s only remaining runner, once the sidepod-damage-addled Sainz had slipped down the order and into retirement during the shower, performed much better than expected. Leclerc was able to break Hamilton’s DRS range early on, then didn’t slip back into it once Verstappen had powered past.

He built a four-second gap over the lead Black Arrows car through the first pitstops (Hamilton was assessed for weaving in front of Lance Stroll after exiting his, which was deemed unworthy of investigation for the stewards by race control). When they ran on the mediums, the gap was generally solid at 3s.

“We had to react to what Lewis was doing behind, which then Red Bull had to react to us a lap later,” Leclerc said, when Perez was pulled in on lap 29, one tour after the sole surviving red car had been serviced again. “So that’s why we were all on the same strategy, because everybody was reacting to somebody else’s strategy.”

This set up the final stint, which Leclerc started with a reduced 1.9s gap to Hamilton. This soon grew back to its previous size and the Ferrari driver was actually thinking about a possible bigger prize rather than defending against the final podium spot he’d already safely snaffled. From lap 36 to lap 40, Leclerc “was seeing that I was doing the same lap times as Checo” and thought “maybe we can get second place – but then very quickly I understood that he was just saving”.

Exactly what Perez was saving was fuel – the lack of dry practice running also impacting the calculations that had to be made pre-race in this critical area. But in any case, Leclerc spotted that “Checo started to push again for a few laps at the end and I could not match that, so I think they also had a bit of margin”.

Rapid pace on Verstappen's out-lap after switching back to softs prompted concerned tones from his engineer

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

Leclerc had to ship “a bit too much” time in those final tours – his pace slipping from the low-1m51s to the mid-1m52s as Ferrari needed him to save fuel rather heavily. But his gap to Hamilton was hardly falling over, the difference between them at 2.9s when lap 42 commenced.

For all Ferrari’s ongoing concerns about its tyre wear compared to its rivals, Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff felt “they had always a tenth, one-and-a-half tenths advantage per lap”, while Hamilton rued “a lot of deg, particularly in the middle sector” as he pushed on after Leclerc all race.

“I always felt like he had an answer for all the laps I did,” Hamilton added. “They had the upper hand this weekend. I was trying, I was pushing a lot.”

Leclerc’s race might have seen unremarkable from the outside, but his consistent pace behind Perez kept the leaders all on the same strategy. So, has Ferrari turned a corner on one of its key weaknesses to Red Bull?

"We didn't want to end up with egg on our face, compromising that in any way. So, to give away one point, I don't think anybody will lose too much sleep over it" Christian Horner

“I think it's a bit too early to say, but it's been two or three races where we are managing our tyres better,” Leclerc said after he’d taken his third 2023 podium. “This was definitely not the reason why we finished so far behind the Red Bulls, I think they were just quicker. But in terms of tyre management, we didn't have a huge degradation. And also looking at Mercedes behind, I was in control of the pace of my tyres.”

Leclerc’s third was sealed when Hamilton stopped for a third time at the end of that 42nd tour. The Briton took new mediums and promptly obliterated Verstappen’s fastest lap by 1.6s with a 1m47.305s final-tour flier.

The fastest lap’s destination had been the main theme of the winner’s final stint too, after he’d been brought in on lap 30 to also move back to new softs like his chasing trio. Verstappen’s out-lap speed – one second quicker than Perez behind – concerned Lambiase enough for him to chide his charge. Then after Verstappen had pumped in his personal best 1m48.922s on the next tour, Lambiase told him “this tyre had reasonable deg in the first stint” and asked Verstappen again to “use your head a bit more”.

After being told his subsequent mid-1m50s pace was more like it but with this remaining quicker than Perez’s early final stint times, Verstappen jokingly suggested he instead could push on and stop for a third time. To give his mechanics “a bit of pitstop practice”, he mused. But Lambiase swiftly rebuffed this idea, which Horner explained: “We didn't take the stop because we didn't want to get too greedy because we won the sprint race [too]”.

A desire to avoid unnecessary risk was behind the call not to pit Verstappen for a pursuit of fastest lap, which went to Hamilton

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Red Bull had spotted its front tyre surfaces beginning to open on the rubber removed at the first stops, which led to its (ignored on its lead car) insistence on careful early-stint treatment.

“A 1-2 finish,” Horner concluded. “We didn't want to end up with egg on our face, compromising that in any way. So, to give away one point, I don't think anybody will lose too much sleep over it tonight.”

Nor, for that matter, will Red Bull mind its Belgian constructors’ trophy pot being damaged one race on from Norris wrecking Verstappen’s Hungarian GP winner’s award. Points mean prizes, but when 12 have been collected in a row in 2023, they don’t all totally matter…

The latest Verstappen victory in 2023 was Red Bull's 12th of the season as its dominance shows no sign of letting up

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