It might be kind to describe the Spa 2025 Formula 1 sprint race as an acquired taste. Yes, that’s definitely extremely kind.
But that doesn’t mean there’s not room to break down what happened and unearth some interesting storylines from it, like, for example, the midfield constructors’ championship fight closing up significantly.
Here are our winners and losers from the race.
Loser – The audience
Short of Max Verstappen’s lap one overtake for the lead, Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris’ short-lived battle, Pierre Gasly forfeiting eighth with a water leak which promoted everybody from ninth on down and Lance Stroll passing Fernando Alonso for 13th, there was very little overtaking in this processional encounter.
The DRS train pinned cars in the order they were at the end of the first lap and the tyres didn’t degrade enough to be a factor, creating a really, really boring race. The only saviour was the slight trepidation that Oscar Piastri or Norris might be able to get a move done on Verstappen.
Late in the race, Lewis Hamilton managed to pass Alex Albon for 15th while Hamilton and Kimi Antonelli had earlier passed Nico Hulkenberg, who finished last on the road. That’s all she wrote, as they say, and thankfully I don’t have to write anything else about the Spa 2025 sprint race. – Jack Benyon
Winner – Max Verstappen
“The team can always count on me that I’ll always give my very best, whoever is in charge.”
He might be working under a new team boss for the first time since 2016, but Verstappen’s right to say he didn’t drive any differently at Spa.
Save for the mid-race lock-up at the Bus Stop chicane – he’d reported struggling to get peak brake pressure just before – this was a vintage performance from Verstappen.
He found the sweet spot of a gap behind Piastri on the run up Eau Rouge/Raidillon (close but not too close) on lap one and inflicted another against-the-odds defeat on McLaren. – Josh Suttill
Loser – Ferrari
Hamilton’s relative lack of progress in the DRS train isn’t a particular barometer of anything, as the damage had been done on Friday afternoon with his qualifying spin.
But Leclerc’s race from fourth on the grid to fourth on the finish will be a lot more alarming than that description suggests.
Leclerc executed a frankly marvellous move around the outside of Norris at Les Combes, but clearly had no chance at all of holding off the McLaren after that.
A finish nearly nine seconds back from Norris in the end, much closer to the fifth-placed Haas than the podium, is grim reading, even if Leclerc probably didn’t push the car to its fullest capacity once he realised his nothing-to-gain race situation. – Valentin Khorounzhiy
Winners – Carlos Sainz and Isack Hadjar
Yes, the job for both was done in qualifying and – ignoring the classification effects of Gasly’s aborted race – they only really held station, but this was an important milestone for both the former ‘Team Faenza’ driver and its newest recruit.
Hadjar’s season had hit a bit of a speed bump with no points since Spain, a barren run that has been concluded here as he made the most of Gasly’s retirement to take the last scoring spot in eighth.
And Sainz, in one third-distance race, more than doubled the amount of points he’s scored since the start of the Monaco round in late May. It was surprisingly also Williams’s best-ever sprint race finish with sixth.
It’s by no means mission accomplished at Spa for either, but it at least means both are borderline immune from having their weekends go down as disappointments. – VK
Loser – Alpine
Was the Alpine going to have enough about it to hang on to the points here?
It’s not clear, but the fact a water leak wrecked Gasly’s opportunity from eighth on the grid, and with Franco Colapinto having no real chance to salvage the team’s race with a pitlane start, it marks another missed opportunity in a season overflowing with them already.
And Gasly’s pace while out on track two laps down will hardly give Alpine a ton of reason to feel confident it can make up for this lost chance over the rest of the weekend. – VK
Winner – Haas
Ollie Bearman put his first points on the board since the fourth race of the season in Bahrain with a seventh place.
And Esteban Ocon converted his fifth place on the grid in a strong start to the weekend for a team that felt like it had missed a huge opportunity in Silverstone last time out.
OK, like many others, neither driver could move up, but that doesn’t really matter with the points on offer, which moves Haas to within one point of Aston Martin for eighth in the constructors, and Racing Bulls is only another point ahead of that. – JB
Loser – Oscar Piastri
A point gained on his title rival team-mate, but any pole position that isn’t converted into a victory for a McLaren driver in 2025 is a loss.
The first lap was his undoing, though it’s difficult to see what Piastri could have done differently.
In his words, “I certainly tried in those 15 laps but to no avail” with differing lines into Eau Rouge and battery management experiments all failing against the Red Bull’s supreme top-speed set-up. – JS
