2023 Belgian GP Review
It was a long format sprint weekend. Qualifying for the sunday race was scheduled on Friday. It began with a wet track with Leclerc on top at the start of Q1. Ricciardo’s great lap was deleted due to Track limits at turn 5 hence pushing him out in Q1. Oscar Piastri saw himself at the top of Q2 with a marvelous lap at the end, we also saw Tsunaoda’s pace in a noncompetitive car. KMag washed the barriers with the Haas during his hot lap in Q2 resulting in another consecutive Q2 elimination. The best part of qualifying was Q3 where in we saw a mighty lap from Leclerc, Norris and Piastri but at the end the result was the same as we were seeing since the past 5 races it was Verstappen with who got the Pole Postion.
The weekend was full of rain as a result we saw many delays on Saturday in both the sprint race and sprint shootout . It was a thrilling and exciting SQ3 as we saw different drivers with great laps but it was the rookie Oscar Piastri who out qualified all of them and it was only Verstappen who could beat him by 0.011s time to get another Sprint pole. Both McLaren and the Red Bull of Verstappen had pace hence toping the time sheets in the shootout.
Due to heavy rain in Spa the Sprint race was delayed to around 45 mins and still the conditions weren’t favorable to race properly. 4 formation laps behind the safety car dried the track a little but and we saw 11 laps of racing in the sprint. Earlier, as the track was wet everybody came out on the Wet tyres but as the track was filled with mixed conditions half the grid came into the pits to change to Intermediate tyres. They all took the risk and made the move while the rest of the grid struggled with the old wet tyres and had to change them a lap after. We saw some racing between max and Oscar on lap 7. We saw Gasly back on the podium after a long time with a performing Alpine car. The sprint came to an end with Max winning and taking the record of most sprint races won.
Finally it was Race day on Sunday the track was dry the weather was bright with the Race scheduled for 3PM. Verstappen started the race and we saw a Turn 1 incident between Sainz and Piastri pushing both of them out of the race. The race was filled with plenty of overtakes in the middle order. Max won the race with a huge margin on Perez with Leclerc finishing him on the Podium. It was an exciting but long weekend and we didn’t see many DNFs like the other races.
