Ferrari won the strategy – Mercedes won the race on a tyre

Pirelli's main expectation was one stop: medium → hard around laps 17–23, with soft → hard as an alternative with a slightly earlier stop. The nomination was C2 as hard, C3 as medium and C4 as soft. Cooler conditions made degradation lower than earlier in the weekend, per Pirelli, and our data confirms it: the hard degraded at 0.021 s/lap, the medium 0.038 and the soft 0.035 – the soft kept pace with the medium. Pit loss under green is 22.8 s at Spa, 16.0 under a VSC. The overtaking threshold is the lowest on the calendar, 0.67 s/lap. Those are the terms the whole race has to be read against.

Russell retired on the opening lap and the Safety Car stayed out for four laps. Then: Antonelli, Verstappen, Leclerc, Hamilton – all on mediums.

Lap 17: Verstappen stops for hards. Red Bull was trying to set up an undercut on Antonelli. On the next lap the VSC came. Mercedes brought Antonelli in under it – 16 seconds instead of 23 – and he rejoined ahead of Verstappen. Verstappen called it bad luck afterwards, per F1.com. The simulator puts a price on that luck: had he waited one lap and stopped under the VSC he would have gained two seconds – and still been third. What cost him second place was not his own timing but what Ferrari did next.

Leclerc and Hamilton stayed out. If another neutralisation comes we get a cheaper stop, Ferrari reasoned – and took the risk that none would. It came, on lap 20, and was long enough. Ferrari brought both cars in on the same lap, hards on both, and Leclerc rejoined ahead of Antonelli. Pirelli afterwards singled out Ferrari as the team that departed from its rivals by extending the medium stint and waiting, per F1.com.

Before the stops: Antonelli, Verstappen, Leclerc. After: Leclerc, Antonelli, Verstappen. Ferrari had taken a car that was not leading and put it ahead of the fastest Mercedes on pure strategy. The simulator says the wait was worth five seconds against stopping under the first VSC – and that the risk was real: had no second VSC come and Leclerc stopped on lap 25, he would have been fourth, nineteen seconds worse off.

Norris started thirteenth on hards and ran 30 laps on them – up to P6 by lap 15, then passed by Leclerc (lap 23), Antonelli (26) and Verstappen (29) and eventually P7. The hards did not give up: the slope of his stint is zero. He was simply half a second a lap slower than the cars on new tyres, and McLaren let both VSCs pass. A stop under either of them, for mediums, would have given P3–P4 according to the simulator. It is the clearest mistake of the race.

Hadjar started twenty-first after engine penalties and did the opposite: three stops, two of them under the Safety Car on laps 1–2 and one under the VSC on lap 20, then 24 laps on hards to P6. Laurent Mekies called it his best race for the team, per F1.com. At Spa, where overtaking is possible, you can give away track position for a tyre offset – in Hungary you could not.

Belgium adds a link to the pattern from Hungary, Zandvoort and Monza: the neutralisation is the cheapest second in Formula 1, and whoever waits for it gains places. But Spa also shows the limit. Ferrari waited best and led – and lost on the tyre they fitted. For three races in a row the softest compound has now lasted 25 laps or more without losing more than the medium. Whoever takes that seriously first wins next time.

How we did it: lap data from FastF1 (F1 Live Timing). Degradation = within-stint slope on green laps, fuel-corrected at 0.035 s/lap. Pit loss under VSC measured from the race's stops. The simulator runs everyone else on their actual lap times and models the changed driver on his own pace per compound from the race. Sources: press.pirelli.com (pre-race assessment and post-race note), F1.com (Verstappen's and Mekies' comments, Pirelli's analysis of Ferrari), FIA timing.