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There is a meeting room at McLaren’s Woking MTC base, within the manufacturing department, which Andrea Stella has named ‘La Source’.
The double meaning is that he firmly believed that from discussions within that meeting room would come the solution to the only real weakness of last year’s car. The room would be ‘the source’ of the solution to corners exactly like Spa’s La Source: low-speed/high rear ride, where the rear downforce was bleeding away.
Whatever was proposed in those meetings turned out to be a resounding success – as Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris delivered a dominant 1-2, 20s clear of Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari and Max Verstappen’s Red Bull. From McLaren’s perspective, that was the significance of this race.
It was really only a rubber-stamping of what we already know, given how good the McLaren was at Monaco. But on the circuit with that bogey corner, it was a performance with resonance at McLaren.
From the perspective of its drivers, it was a high-pressure win for Piastri, an impressive mix of commitment and control, a resigned defeat for Norris.
Piastri’s commitment came on the opening lap from the rolling start as he nailed Eau Rouge in the wet harder than the race-leading pole-setter Norris and used that to burst through the spray and tow past on the Kemmel Straight. It was a lead he’d never lose. But this was not assured until very near the end, as the switch from inters to slicks afforded the chasing Norris the opportunity to do an offset tyre strategy (C1 hards compared to Piastri’s C3 mediums). The C1s could more comfortably get to the end than Piastri’s more delicate rubber.
It was far from certain at the time of those stops which would be the faster tyre over such a distance. So Piastri had to balance pace and tyre management very carefully, while monitoring his gap over his charging team-mate. There was a window where Piastri might have converted to an extra stop, come out still in second but 11s behind with 14 laps to go on tyres which would have been 17 laps newer.
In theory that would have been a feasible route to victory, but it would obviously have been complicated by having to pass Norris again wheel-to-wheel. He preferred to avoid that, judging that he just about had the tyre life to keep himself out of range.
As Norris was obliged to drive a more aggressive race, he made a series of small errors – running wide at Pouhon, locking up a couple of times into La Source - which lost around 3s of the gains he’d made. It might have made a difference – as he had closed the gap to 3s with two laps to go and was lapping around 0.7s faster. But maybe not – because Piastri on the penultimate lap showed just how much he’d been saving the tyres, producing his own fastest lap of the race.
The different routes to the respective results of the Mclaren drivers came on lap 12 as it became clear the track was now dry enough for slicks to replace the very worn inters. Mediums was the conventional choice and what had been discussed in the team briefing and Piastri was happy to go with it, given the possibility that the untried hard was going to be slow (at two steps softer than the medium).
Norris was given the option of taking the hard and replied in the affirmative. Because the tyres that were readied were mediums, his choice involved him doing an extra lap on the inters – ballooning Piastri’s lead over him from under 2s to over 9s. Had he asked for the mediums, McLaren would have stacked him. Either way, he wouldn’t lose position.
It was a luxury option McLaren could afford to give Norris because of the superiority of a car which had finally been made complete by those meeting in the ‘La Source’ room.
Twenty seconds behind at the flag, Leclerc kept his low-winged Ferrari ahead of Verstappen’s bigger-winged Red Bull throughout. George Russell, in his even lower-winged Mercedes, kept up with them for a time before the tyre deg led him to fall back to a more distant fifth place.
Lewis Hamilton, starting from the pitlane after his disastrous qualifying, allowed Ferrari to fit him with a big wing suitable for the early wet conditions. With this he scythed through the lower half of the field and was making good progress until coming up against the obstacle of a low-drag Williams driven with resolute determination by Alex Albon. Had Hamilton been able to find a way past that, he had the pace to have arrived on Russell’s tail (where he would have faced the same problem of being quicker over the lap but slower at the overtaking spots).
The lower half of the field was a one-stop vs two-stop contest won by the one-stoppers.
“I knew lap one was my best chance,” said Piastri, who’d disappointed himself with qualifying only second on Saturday. But that was probably the best place to be, as Spa has shown so many times before. The big slipstreaming effect on that first lap tends to put the outside front row starter in the lead by Les Combes. But the move still needs to be nailed and was made extra difficult by the rolling start (because of the hazardously wet conditions, which caused the start to be delayed by over an hour).
“I lifted as little as dared through Eau Rouge. After that, it was mostly under control,” Piastri said.
Distant third-place finisher Leclerc, after a great performance, gave a resigned thumbs-up acknowledgement to the Ferrari team below as he stood on the podium. His look said it all.
