Kimi Antonelli sent a message on Friday afternoon at Spa-Francorchamps. Whether anyone in the paddock needed another reminder that the 19-year-old Mercedes driver intends to be a problem for everyone else is a separate question.
Antonelli topped the second practice session for the Belgian Grand Prix with a lap 0.190 seconds quicker than McLaren’s Lando Norris and a staggering 1.285 seconds clear of his own teammate, George Russell. The margin to Russell was large enough that Russell felt compelled to contextualize it over team radio: “Rears felt too cold, sliding a lot. But not 1.2 seconds cold.”
The session’s defining moment belonged to Alpine’s Pierre Gasly, who lost control on the exit of the Fagnes chicane in the middle sector and clouted the barrier hard enough to tear off his right rear wheel. The red flag that followed cut short the race-simulation runs in the final part of FP2 and left Gasly’s crew facing a long night of reconstruction.
“I just had a big snap, lost the car, but it was a huge snap and it took a lot longer to recover and by the time I recovered I was already off the track and could not get back on track,” Gasly said. Alpine team principal Steve Nielsen called it “a small mistake, which on other tracks would have been fine, but on this track you get punished for it in certain places.”
Antonelli’s afternoon was a sharp reversal from the opening session, where he was only sixth fastest and Russell eighth. “Was a massive turnaround with the car, because P1 we struggled a lot,” Antonelli said. “It was a good change but of course a lot of work to do because Red Bull is quick, McLaren was up there. Long run felt very strong as well.”
Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin confirmed the team had misjudged grip levels in FP1. “We thought there’d be more grip than there was, but the drivers were a lot happier with the car in the afternoon,” Shovlin said. Of Russell’s deficit, he added: “Not a great lap for George but it was only one lap. If that doesn’t go well you look like you’re off the pace.”
On the single-lap qualifying simulations, Max Verstappen’s Red Bull sat third, behind Antonelli and Norris but ahead of Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari and Isack Hadjar. Verstappen, who topped FP1, downplayed the gap. “You see the real gap but it is nothing shocking, it is expected,” he said. His long-run pace, once equalized for traffic, matched Antonelli’s.
The entire grid is wrestling with Spa’s energy-hungry layout, which drains the hybrid battery systems on the long straights and forces cars into recovery mode — a phenomenon known in F1 as “clipping.” Norris described the effect bluntly: “We go from almost 320km/h to almost 270km/h because we just have no battery left. Every single straight we’re clipping.”
Norris, Hadjar, and Aston Martin’s Lance Stroll will all serve grid penalties this weekend for exceeding their permitted number of battery deployments, complicating Sunday’s starting order regardless of qualifying results.
Red Bull arrived at Spa without their experimental ‘flip-flop’ rear wing, shelved after consecutive crashes for Verstappen in high-speed corners in Austria and at Silverstone. The wing was closing too much, eliminating the slot gap between the main plane and flap and reducing downforce on corner entry. Technical director Pierre Wache said the team identified the mechanical problem after the Silverstone incident and reverted to the standard wing, which insiders estimate costs roughly 0.2 seconds per lap. Red Bull expect a revised version ready for the Hungarian Grand Prix next weekend.
The top 10 in FP2 was rounded out by McLaren’s Oscar Piastri, Alpine’s Franco Colapinto, Russell, and the Racing Bulls pair of Arvid Lindblad and Liam Lawson, with Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc eleventh.
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