I feel like we all sold our souls for the championship battle excitement of 2021 and now we're just waiting for 2026.
So what do we reckon? I'm going for Max P3 by the end of the Kemmel straight and race lead by lap 3 if it's dry.
really, racing gods? would it have killed you to let Oscar have this?
This kind of used to be the norm at Hungaroring until we had a few years of rain and it being one of the few places Merc's PU wasn't super effective. It's not really a great track for racing.
McLaren's pace seems legit, which is cool, and fast corners at Spa should suit them even more than Hungaroring. Good job to the Woking boys.
Aston Martin and Ferrari should have been better here, so a middling performance behind Merc and McLaren doesn't look good. Maybe just putting all their eggs in to next year's basket?
Mercedes looked back to their usual performance levels after a great qualifying lap from Hamilton yesterday
Alpine is such a disaster of a team, I want to like Enstone like I did in the 2000s with Alonso and early 10s with Raikkonen, but they're just tragic. Today wasn't even their fault, but it's such an Alpine thing to happen.
Perez was better today, especially on a track that's hard to pass, but Ricciardo looked like he has a bit of a spark back. With Verstappen running away with every race I can't deny that I wouldn't mind giving Daniel a shot in the RBR at this point. Anything to make the battle for the lead a little bit different.
Great Quali pace from Alfa Romeo turned in to a typically pointless race result. While the Ferraris, Perez, Russell and Alonso were likely to get by, Albon in the Williams should definetely not have finished ahead of them. Considering the money Audi is starting to invest in the team I hope they begin to see more results.
For a first race back having being taken out in T1, Ricciardo has done a wicked job here. Tsunoda obviously not had the best race of the year, but he's 10s behind right now.
I'd be starting to think about picking up Piastri over Norris at this point. It's his rookie year and he's on a very similar race pace as Norris, maybe not got the ultimate quali pace yet. Norris took over a year to look this close to Sainz, and never consistantly beat him. He's only going to get better and the McLaren is notoriously unbalanced so he can handle an imperfect car. He's probably cheaper and not on as long a contract. Norris is still the better of the two at the moment but I wonder if he will be for long.
I don't think Oscar drove any worse than Lando today. I can see him regularly beating Norris next year.