Red Bull’s Max Verstappen crushed the rest of the field to take a stunning victory in the Belgian Grand Prix.
The world championship leader was in a class of his own as he fought quickly from 14th to take a firm lead by lap 18 and disappear into the distance.
Verstappen was a second a lap – sometimes more – quicker even than team-mate Sergio Perez, who completed a one-two for a dominant Red Bull.
Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz held off Mercedes’ George Russell to take third.
On another planet
Verstappen’s ninth win in 14 races consolidated his championship lead.
His only rival, Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, finished fifth, but was demoted to sixth by a penalty for speeding in the pit lane and has now dropped to third place in the standings, five points behind Perez, with a 98-point deficit to Verstappen that is now surely unrecoverable.
Verstappen went into the summer break on the back of one of his greatest victories, winning in Hungary from 10th on the grid, thanks partly to the latest in a series of Ferrari strategy mistakes for Leclerc.
And the Dutchman began the run-in to the end of the season with an even more emphatic statement of his and Red Bull’s superiority.
From the moment Verstappen took to the track in practice on a dank Friday afternoon, he looked imperious, and even a grid penalty for using too many engine parts could not stand in his way.
Verstappen – one of seven drivers who suffered penalties that put them to the ‘back of the grid’ – took a stunning pole position by nearly 0.7secs from Sainz, and his pace led to predictions from many in the paddock, including Russell, that he would win despite his penalty.
And so it proved.
Choosing the unfavoured soft tyre from the start, on the first sunny day of action of the weekend, Verstappen made rapid progress – he was eighth by the end of lap one.
There was a safety car on lap one after two separate incidents – Lewis Hamilton was ordered to park his Mercedes on track after it was damaged by him colliding with Fernando Alonso’s Alpine trying to pass around the outside of Les Combes on lap one, for which Hamilton accepted the blame; and a crash for Valtteri Bottas’ Alfa Romeo trying to avoid a spinning Nicholas Latifi’s Williams on lap two.
Within a lap of the restart on lap five, Verstappen was up to fifth. By lap 10, he was on team-mate Perez’s tail as the Mexican closed on Sainz.
Sainz pitted on lap 11 to change his soft tyres and Verstappen took the lead by passing Perez.
Despite being on worn soft tyres, Verstappen continued to set a prodigious pace, but dropped behind Sainz when he stopped on lap 15.
But he emerged three seconds behind, and was on Sainz’s tail a lap later, ahead up the long Kemmel Straight on the next tour, and two seconds in front by the end of it.
That was the end of any battle for the lead as Verstappen crushed the field, two seconds faster than Sainz, who was soon passed by Perez.
Ferrari, who have been closely matched with Red Bull for most of the year, had no pace, and Sainz had to spend the rest of the race worrying about Russell’s Mercedes behind him.
Russell closed in over the final stages of the race but Sainz hung on and just managed to take third place.
A sobering day for Leclerc
Leclerc came to Belgium knowing that he had to beat Verstappen and start making ground in the championship, but the Red Bull’s pace left him and Ferrari flabbergasted and lacking an explanation for what had gone wrong.
Leclerc’s race was damaged when he had to pit early because of smoking front wheel – caused by overheating from a visor tear-off stuck in a brake duct – which meant he went to the back.
He fought back well to fifth but was unable to close on Russell, who he finished more than 20 seconds behind.
Leclerc pitted on the penultimate lap in a bid to claim fastest lap, but it was complicated by the fact that he came out only just ahead of Alonso’s Alpine and the Spaniard overtook into fifth place going up the hill into Les Combes.
Leclerc repassed Alonso into the same corner on the final lap but his attempt to reclaim fastest lap from Verstappen failed by 0.6secs.
To add insult to injury, Leclerc was given a five-second penalty for speeding in the pit lane and dropped back behind Alonso.
Team boss Mattia Binotto said the usual speed sensor for the pit-lane limiter was damaged by Leclerc’s early wheel overheating, and the back-up system was wrongly calibrated – he went 0.1km/h over the limit.
Alonso, after a strong drive from third on the grid, was rewarded with sixth on the road and fifth in the results.
His team-mate Esteban Ocon pulled off the overtaking move of the race on his way to seventh.
After Sebastian Vettel passed Pierre Gasly out of the La Source hairpin, Ocon, right behind them, drafted both as Gasly went to repass Vettel.
Ocon went to the outside and they went three-wide into Les Combes, snatching the lead with a brave bit of out-braking in a move reminiscent of Mika Hakkinen’s famous pass of Michael Schumacher around backmarker Ricardo Zonta in 2000.
Vettel claimed eighth, followed by Gasly, as Alex Albon claimed the final point for Williams after his impressive ninth place in qualifying, which became sixth on the grid.
