Antonelli wins at Spa, but the real race was fought in watts: Leclerc second, with the virtual safety car proving decisive

Penalties have taken their toll on Hamilton, with both penalties and unexpected issues in the pits. As if the initial five-second penalty – compounded by a pit stop slowed down by a mechanical problem that saw him slip down to eighth place on lap 31 – weren’t enough, he remained under scrutiny until the end of the Grand Prix due to the lack of regulations determining the urgency of a decision before the end of the race. The seven-time world champion fought his way back to finish fourth, but the verdict on his Sunday is clear: without the five-second penalty and the pit stop mishap, the battle for the podium would have featured a different contender. 

Antonelli regains the lead in the closing stages, with his overtaking manoeuvre on Leclerc proving decisive. After losing the lead during the pit stop window, Antonelli methodically closed the gap on the Ferrari and, on lap 34, overtook it under braking at the end of the Kemmel straight, reclaiming first place, which he would not relinquish until the chequered flag. A particularly impressive result, especially given the poor performance of his team-mate Russell, who leaves Spa without any points after arriving at the weekend just 25 points behind the leader. One of the few and unfortunate DNFs in this race: the others were, in fact, ‘merely’ the ‘invisible’ Sergio Perez in his Cadillac and Lance Stroll in his Aston Martin, who on several occasions during this first half of the 2026 season failed to finish due to serious reliability issues.  

By contrast, a now disillusioned Verstappen limited the damage: content to start from second on the grid, he finished third with no real chance of victory, but having managed his tyre wear with great composure in the closing stages: a result that Red Bull accepts with pragmatism, given the current limitations of the technical package on a circuit that favours raw power on the long straights. For Ferrari, Leclerc’s podium finish comes after a weekend in which Vasseur had already identified energy management as the potentially decisive factor, speaking on the eve of the race about speed differences between the cars of up to 20 km/h from one straight to the next, depending on where the teams choose to discharge the electric component. 

McLaren, Alonso and the rest of the field. Behind the podium, Hamilton finished fourth, Piastri fifth and Norris seventh, the latter still hampered by the ten-place grid penalty he served for changing the ECU; Isack Hadjar slotted in between them; having started from the back of the grid, he managed his tyre strategy perfectly and finished sixth. Fernando Alonso, meanwhile, ended another unremarkable weekend at the back of the field. 

The real focus of the weekend is the technical aspect, something that hasn’t been discussed since the first three races: the race is won (and lost) in the deployment. Setting aside on-track incidents, the overarching theme of the Grand Prix remains energy management: there is no longer a pure attack through the corners, but when combined with active aerodynamics, these factors become variables that create enormous differences which, unfortunately, decide the races with no chance of appeal for the less competitive teams. Interviews and radio communications over the weekend confirm this: engineers and drivers spend the bulk of their time discussing regeneration windows, power release points and trade-offs between straights and cornering, whilst the information exchanged via radio – precisely because the power delivery strategy is a competitive advantage – is often calibrated so as not to reveal to the opponent the actual amount of residual energy available at various points on the track. On a circuit like Spa, where the long straights reward those with ‘charge’ to spare, this means that the instinct to always push to the limit – the very idea that drew many of these drivers to motorsport as children – is now systematically subordinated to energy calculations: a technical paradigm shift that the 2026 generation of power units has made structural, rather than episodic. And one that remains unresolved in terms of its appeal, first and foremost to the drivers but also to the more knowledgeable fans.