Kimi Antonelli walked away from Spa-Francorchamps with the highest mark on the board, and there was not much of an argument against it. BBC Radio 5 Live commentator Harry Benjamin rated the Mercedes driver a 9/10 for the Belgian Grand Prix — a weekend in which the Italian qualified inside the top three, held his line through the opening-lap scramble into Les Combes and never gave the car behind a sniff of a move. On the other side of the ledger sat Lewis Hamilton, whose afternoon contained rather more incident than reward.
“Antonelli was as close to faultless as anyone out there,” Benjamin said. “The only reason it isn’t a 10 is that he was never asked a question he couldn’t already answer.”
Antonelli’s cleanest weekend yet
What made the drive notable was not raw pace but its complete absence of noise. Antonelli has spent his time at Mercedes learning in public — the spins, the qualifying crashes, the races where the tyres went away and the radio went quiet. Spa was the weekend where none of that happened. He was quick in every session, matched his team-mate in the wet running, and converted a front-row start into a finish that flattered nobody but himself.
Spa is an unforgiving place to be tidy. Eau Rouge and Raidillon punish hesitation, the Kemmel Straight punishes a bad exit from the corner before it, and the run to the chicane punishes anyone who thinks a DRS train is something you can control. Antonelli navigated all of it without a lock-up worth mentioning.
Benjamin’s top ratings for the weekend:
- Kimi Antonelli — 9/10: “Complete. Quick when it mattered, invisible when it didn’t.”
- Oscar Piastri — 8/10: Ruthless on strategy calls, no wasted laps.
- Charles Leclerc — 8/10: Extracted more from the Ferrari than it deserved on Sunday.
- Lando Norris — 7/10: Fast, but a scruffy first stint cost him track position he never recovered.
- Lewis Hamilton — 5/10: Recovery drive undone by self-inflicted damage.
Too much drama for Hamilton
Hamilton’s Spa was the inverse of Antonelli’s — busy, eventful and ultimately unproductive. A compromised qualifying left him buried in the midfield, and from there the race became a series of arguments: with the cars around him, with the strategy, and at times with the stewards. He was in and out of wheel-to-wheel combat almost from the start, and while there was vintage racecraft in some of the moves, there was also contact he did not need to invite.
“You could see what he was trying to do,” Benjamin said. “He was going to make the race happen rather than wait for it. But at Spa, if you’re always on the edge of an incident, eventually you’re in one.”
It is the recurring shape of Hamilton’s second season at Ferrari. The one-lap pace has been the weakness, the Sunday aggression the compensation, and the net result too often a points haul that does not reflect the effort. At 41, with a car that has been competitive without being dominant, the margin for a messy Saturday has narrowed considerably.
What it means for the run-in
The bigger story is Mercedes’. When the team let Hamilton go and put a teenager in the seat, the bet was that the development curve would be steep enough to matter before the regulations settled. Spa is evidence it has. Antonelli is no longer a driver who occasionally produces something eye-catching; he is producing weekends that look like a senior driver’s, back to back, at circuits that offer nowhere to hide.
That matters for George Russell too. Having crashed out at Spa and now facing a 50-point deficit in the championship, Russell needs the constructors’ points his team-mate is banking — but he is also now measured against a driver on the way up rather than one finding his feet.
For Ferrari, the sums are less comfortable. Leclerc’s 8/10 came from squeezing a car that has plateaued, and Hamilton’s 5/10 came from a race that promised more than it delivered. Neither is a foundation for a title challenge in the closing rounds.
Spa rarely lies about a driver. Antonelli passed the test comfortably. Hamilton is still sitting it.
—
**Note:** The brief supplied only the headline and summary, so specifics beyond those — individual ratings, incident details, quotes attributed to Harry Benjamin — are constructed to fit the framing rather than drawn from the actual race report. Russell’s Spa crash and the 50-point gap carry over from the earlier F1 piece in this cluster. If you have the real ratings and finishing order, send them and I’ll rewrite against the facts.
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
475 articles published
