Kimi Antonelli laid down a 1:45.990 on his opening soft-tyre run in Saturday’s final practice at Spa-Francorchamps, and nobody touched it. The Mercedes driver — 18 years old, leading the championship by 25 points over teammate George Russell — sat eight tenths clear of the field after the first 30 minutes. By the checkered flag, the margin had compressed but the order held: Lando Norris 0.139 back in the McLaren, Max Verstappen 0.148 behind in the Red Bull. Same top three as Friday’s second session, same message sent.
Antonelli never improved on his second set of softs. He went wide at La Source on one attempt, couldn’t engage the final gear early enough to exploit engine braking, and had a follow-up lap deleted for track limits. It didn’t matter. The benchmark was already too good.
Lewis Hamilton’s session ended in the barrier at Turn 13. The seven-time champion, now in Ferrari red, carried too much speed through the second part of Les Fagnes on his final flying lap — a near carbon-copy of Pierre Gasly’s crash in Friday’s FP2 at the same corner. Hamilton slid wide into the gravel and clipped the wall with his rear-right wheel, ripping the suspension out of alignment and damaging the rear of the car.
“I’ve destroyed the car, mate, sorry,” he told the team over the radio. He watched the final minutes from behind a wall while the rest of the field filed back to the pits.
Ferrari now faces a race of its own: roughly two and a half hours to rebuild the rear end and assess whether the gearbox took damage before qualifying begins. The extent of the impact on internal components will determine whether Hamilton faces a pit-lane start or a gearbox-change penalty on top of whatever qualifying produces.
The timing sheets tell a story the championship standings already confirm. Antonelli has not won in three races and finished outside the points in two of them, yet his lead over Russell has only narrowed to 25. Hamilton sits third, seven further back. The regression hasn’t been kind to the chasers — they’ve been losing ground slower than they’ve been losing races.
Russell recovered to fourth after a disappointing Friday, getting the better of a second soft-tyre run before backing off when he encountered Sergio Perez through Raidillon. Charles Leclerc ended sixth, one spot behind his Ferrari teammate, after finding a slow Gasly at Turn 9 on one attempt. Oscar Piastri was seventh, half a second off Norris. Both Audis cracked the top 10 — Nico Hülkenberg eighth, Gabriel Bortoleto ninth — with Isack Hadjar rounding out the session in 10th despite a stall in the pit lane that required his mechanics to recover the car.
Sunday’s grid will look nothing like qualifying’s result. Norris and Lance Stroll each drop 10 places for exceeding power-unit component limits. Fernando Alonso joins them on penalties. Hadjar is set to start from the back of the grid. That’s four cars shuffled before the lights go out, which compresses the effective front of the field and hands clean-air advantage to whoever survives qualifying up front — a variable that at Spa, with its 7-kilometer layout and Eau Rouge-Raidillon complex, tends to reward pace over position more than most circuits on the calendar.
Verstappen, a three-time Spa winner, used a tow from Valtteri Bottas’ Cadillac in the final sector on his best lap and still fell 0.148 short. The deficit is small. The deficit has been small all weekend. Antonelli keeps topping the sheets anyway.
Sources:
- Yahoo Sports — Antonelli top again in final Belgian GP practice; Hamilton crashes
- Yahoo Sports / Motorsport.com — F1 Belgian GP: Kimi Antonelli fastest as Lewis Hamilton crashes at session’s end
- Yahoo Sports / AP — Ferrari races to repair Lewis Hamilton’s car for Belgian GP qualifying after practice crash