Welcome to the jungle? When Formula 1.5 came to Spa

Magnificent as Spa-Francorchamps is, this hallowed circuit is no stranger to grotesque miscarriages of competence.

Think back to 2021 and a race which, thanks to wet weather (at Spa? Fancy that!), finally got under way some time after most respectable folk had popped their roast dinner in the oven, and then only for a couple of perfunctory laps behind the safety car before "sorry folks, no refunds".

And then there was the 1985 Belgian Grand Prix, where the organisers, in their wisdom, contrived to relay the circuit with an unproven and experimental aggregate 10 days before the race. Aggro was certainly what they got when the new track surface broke up and the entire event had to be abandoned on the Saturday afternoon, and rescheduled for later in the year.

The spectacle of the 2026 weekend will now commingle with these ignominious examples in the swirling bin juice of history.

Watching a downforce-endowed racing car being driven at the limit through Pouhon, the sweeping double-left-hander, used to rank among the most visceral experiences an F1 fan could have. Well worth the hassle of the fickle Ardennes microclimate, along the heavy-handed security who always presented as simply begging for an excuse to set their dogs on you.

With the current cars it’s now easy-flat since the electrical reserves of their batteries are long since depleted – so the best drivers in the world simply roll their eyes, downshift, and wonder how it came to this.

"I think no one out there is enjoying the qualifying lap as much as we did last year," mused Carlos Sainz. "I think it's clear that we've lost quite a bit with these cars around Spa. Having said that, I don't want to keep belittling my own sport because it's not going to do any good. I think we all know this is not good enough.

Sainz wants answers on how it all came to this in F1

Photo by: Steven Tee / LAT Images via Getty Images

“Whoever saw these simulations in 2022, 2023 and look at it and didn’t say, ‘how can we even accept that?’ They need to review what happened there because it should never have happened.”

The commercial rights holders’ response was to activate nothing-to-see-here mode. Throughout practice, it was rare indeed for the world TV feed to show onboard footage from a car passing through the areas most blighted by super clipping and such. One wondered how it would be possible to go through the entire race while only cutting to the in-car shot at the 50-metre board of the Bus Stop, for instance.

After qualifying, F1 made a point of sharing on social media the full on-board lap from polesitter Antonelli’s car – minus, conspicuously, the usual graphics demonstrating speeds and the battery’s state of charge. There are few things in this world more obvious than drunk people trying to sneak into a house quietly, but full marks to F1 for brazenly testing the boundaries of what’s possible.

"When you've got qualifying grids decided by computers behaving or misbehaving, it's a pretty crap way of going racing" Oscar Piastri

Antonelli’s pole lap was 1m44.361s, the better part of four seconds slower than last year’s pole position time. Lance Stroll’s will-this-do qualifying lap aboard the miserable Aston Martin AMR26 was 1m50.177s.

Rafael Camara’s Formula 2 pole time was 1m56.306s. This writer did not have an Adrian Newey car being closer in pace to the product of an increasingly pointless spec-chassis series than that of a proper F1 car on the bingo card for 2026, but them’s the breaks. Perhaps it’s time to institute a Formula 1.5 category.

Most onerous of all, this was yet another race in which we were spared disaster only by the skills of the drivers.

The speed differences witnessed at the start of the Belgian GP warned of a dangerous precedent

Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images

“I expected Kimi [Antonelli] to come by, and then I looked in my mirror and just saw a red rocket [Charles Leclerc] coming,” said Max Verstappen of the harum-scarum run to Les Combes on the opening lap. “I was like, ‘Oh, I'll just hold my line because if I move here, we're going to have an airplane shunt.’ So, it was pretty incredible, the [speed] differences. Welcome to F1 2026. Sometimes it can be a jungle.”

When drivers are barely in control of their cars, owing to the opaque effects of the machine-learning algorithms which determine how much electrical power can be meted out and when, a reckoning is surely coming. Interestingly, on Sunday afternoon UK TV viewers had a choice between watching the Belgian Grand Prix on Sky Sports F1 or the Deal Or No Deal Celebrity Special on ITV, a show in which the aim is in effect to guess the contents of a box. Long-term, it is probably cheaper to watch the latter.

“It sucks,” said Oscar Piastri – not of Deal Or No Deal or its ‘celebrity’ line-up, but of the powerlessness of the drivers to make a difference when software determines how much energy they’re granted. “I can't really say it any other way than that... when you've got qualifying grids decided by computers behaving or misbehaving, it's a pretty crap way of going racing.”

Piastri and co continue to be left frustrated by the new F1 cars

Photo by: Marc Fleury