It was a weekend for everyone in Spa. What should happen to be a yield in the few summer holidays turned into a heartbreaking and sombre weekend where the Formula 2 driver Anthoine Hubert was fatally injured in an accident on Saturday.
For those who didn’t know himAnthoine Hubert had been also a rising star on the ladder to transplant 1. Anthoine took on the race track winning the F4 title although his Father Francois had been a rally driver.
F1 drivers: ” We raced for Hubert
The Frenchman won the GP3 Championship last season and has been rewarded with a contract using the Driver Academy of the Renault F1 team. Anthoine graduated to F2 and instantly impressed winning on home soil in France and at Monaco, and has been in line to get a chair with a few of the best teams at the series for next year.
I didn’t really know Anthoine – I had only met him a few occasions from the paddock with a few mutual friends, but he had been a beautiful and popular young guy. I had been interviewing Charles Leclerc after Qualifying at the Skypad neither of us understood how terrible it was and when the accident happened in fact that it turned out to be a friend of his who had been involved. The reaction from greats such as Lewis Hamilton and Alain Prost advised you we are these days once we lose a driver.
There were lots of people of the paddock – in our Sky F1 team – and on social media who wondered how drivers can continue driving at high speeds through the exact same corners and taking the very exact risks. That ability to detach from the external world when you place your helmet on, and focus is exactly what makes drivers special.
In which somebody was killed, I’ve been fortunate that in 18 decades of driving race cars, I been engaged in a race. This was Allan Simonsen at Le Mans in 2013 and I recall hearing about it just as I’d set my helmet on and put in the car and my team-mate Brendon Hartley came to change over. The fact that keep focussed to the next 22 hours and I had to push straight away meant that I – and all the other drivers in the race – managed to carry on driving flat out we took.
It is a defence mechanism which their brain is engaged in by all racing drivers. That feeling ‘it won’t happen to people’ but every so often, tragically we are reminded by the sport of the risks lurking just around the corner.
If you talk with Sir Jackie Stewart in regards to the era he raced in, he will tell you losing friends and competitions almost on a monthly basis wasn’t rare and it’s thanks to people like him and the FIA that people haven’t lost as many motorists in recent times. There’ll be a complete investigation of course and there will be lessons which everybody is able to learn but motor sport is dangerous and also every single driver – Anthoine comprised – takes every time we put into the cockpit of a racing car to the risks.
As for the Grand Prix it was fantastic to see Charles Leclerc eventually get the win he deserved. He’s driven all during this year and following the chance of losing possible wins in Baku Bahrain and Austria, it was great to see him get one online. Charles was catastrophic in Qualifying, beating his World Champion team partner for this time and its sixth Qualifying by a of a second.
In the race he managed to split with tyre administration and pace away from Sebastian. When Hamilton started to close down the gap, although it got a little tricky at the end, it was a performance.
Mercedes ran more downforce and of course made it difficult for them to overtake. It meant they had good speed in the middle sector of the lap so we needed a cat and mouse game where one car was obviously quicker than the other.
There is not much more that Mercedes might have achieved – perhaps a stop would have reduced the deficit to Leclerc by a couple of seconds but it is not a race that you’ll be able to criticise them .
Vettel appeared to suffer with tyre degradation more than his youthful team-mate and I wonder whether maybe Ferrari would have attempted to run somewhat more downforce simply to help him in the twistier middle sector of their lap because the benefit they had on the complete power run during the first sector was absolutely enormous.
As soon as we go to Monza weekend that is next, Ferrari must have more of an edge. There are fewer corners than we have at Spa and much more to the point, only a few corners which is where the front end grip of this Mercedes is a step that is fantastic better than the red cars. They would need to do something very wrong to not provide a victory before their tifosi week!
Lando Norris was quite unlucky not to have a effect that is good while the place was inherited by Alex Albon at the end. The Thai driver did a good job on his first outing with the group – he was less than three tenths slower than Max Verstappen in Qualifying before he aborted his lap in the end on account of the grid penalties which turned out to be a very good effort for his first semester in the auto.
In the racehe bided his time on and then made progress in the second half to record a career best outcome.
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