Antonelli Tops Belgian GP FP2 as Gasly Crashes Heavily at Spa

Kimi Antonelli set the fastest time in second practice at the Belgian Grand Prix on Friday, 0.190 seconds clear of Lando Norris, while Pierre Gasly put his Alpine into the barrier hard enough to tear off the right rear wheel and bring out the red flag. One circuit, one afternoon, and two garages heading into very different evenings.

A snap at Fagnes

Gasly's crash came at the exit of Fagnes, the medium-speed chicane in the middle sector, where the Alpine snapped sideways and clipped the barrier before the right rear wheel parted company with the car. The stoppage cut short the race-simulation runs that teams save for the end of Friday, which means everyone's homework is incomplete, and Alpine's homework now includes rebuilding a car.

The driver himself was calmer about it than the state of his machinery suggested. "Overall it was a good day of testing. Just need to work on what happened in the P2," Gasly said. "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."

Team principal Steve Nielsen filed it under the oldest heading in the Spa catalogue. "A small mistake, which on other tracks would have been fine, but on this track you get punished for it in certain places," he said. Spa keeps a ledger of small mistakes. It charges interest on them.

The teenager with the shrinking cushion

Antonelli arrived in Belgium as a championship leader in the uncomfortable position of leading a title race while losing it. His advantage over Mercedes team-mate George Russell stood at 68 points three races ago. It is now 25, a slide built on Antonelli's retirement from second place in Barcelona, a Silverstone weekend in which a wheel fairing failure and then a penalty turned a probable victory into nothing, and Russell's win in Austria, his first since the season opener in Australia.

Friday read like a reply. The 19-year-old Italian was only sixth in a scrappy opening session, with Russell eighth, and then found something in the break that turned the afternoon on its head. His best lap in second practice beat Norris by 0.190 seconds and Russell by 1.285, a gap between team-mates that needed explaining.

Russell offered the first draft over the radio. "Rears [tyres] felt too cold, sliding a lot," he reported during the session. "But not 1.2 seconds cold." Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin filled in the rest: "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. He felt he didn't have the tyres ready for the start of the lap."

Antonelli's own reading was that the car, not the driver, had been transformed between sessions. "Was a massive turnaround with the car, because P1 we struggled a lot," he 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."

The long-run numbers back him up, with a caveat. On the few race-simulation laps completed before Gasly's crash ended them, Antonelli averaged 0.3secs a lap quicker than Norris and 0.4secs clear of Russell. Max Verstappen, once his run was equalised for traffic and length, matched the Mercedes. Behind the leading group of Antonelli, Norris, Verstappen, Lewis Hamilton and Isack Hadjar, the top ten was completed by Oscar Piastri, Franco Colapinto, Russell, and the Racing Bulls pair of Arvid Lindblad and Liam Lawson, with Charles Leclerc's Ferrari only eleventh.

Batteries, clipping and engines that stop pulling

The theme of the day, though, was not lap time. It was electricity. Spa's long straights are draining the batteries of this generation of cars faster than they can recover the energy, so the engines drop into recovery mode long before the braking zones, a phenomenon the paddock calls clipping. The cars accelerate, the battery empties, and the speed simply drains away like bathwater.

Norris, the world champion, put numbers on it. "There is just lack of deployment everywhere. Every single straight. The worst one is through Blanchimont. We go from almost 320km/h to almost 270km/h because we just have no battery left. Every single straight we're clipping," he said. His broader verdict on McLaren's Friday was measured: "P1 not great. P2 a little bit happier, I am still not very happy with the car, it is still very difficult to drive but we seemed a bit closer."

Hamilton, 0.747secs off the pace in fourth, described Ferrari's afternoon as the oldest Spa compromise of all: how much wing to run when the middle sector wants downforce and the straights want none. "Spa is still amazing to drive," the 41-year-old said. "Through corners is great, it's just on the straights the engine dies. I don't know what they're going to do to fix that in the future. The engine should just keep pulling." He expects Ferrari to concentrate overnight on a middle sector he called "a little slow for us".

Verstappen, third on the single-lap runs after topping the first session ahead of the two Ferraris, was grumbling about gearshifts and otherwise content. "It has been all right for me, didn't have big problems, the car has been in quite a good window," he said. "It is just a bit of a tough track with the energy management, seems like we're a bit slow on the straight compared to some of our competitors, but balance-wise it was OK."

Penalties now, wings later

The battery problem is not only costing straight-line speed. It is costing grid positions. Norris will serve a 10-place grid penalty this weekend for exceeding his permitted number of batteries, and Hadjar, fifth fastest on Friday, and Aston Martin's Lance Stroll are in the same queue at the stewards' window.

Red Bull, meanwhile, are racing without their so-called flip-flop rear wing, shelved after Verstappen's crashes in high-speed corners in Austria and at Silverstone. The failure saw the wing close too far and shut the slot gap between the main plane and the flap, removing downforce exactly when the driver was leaning on it, and reverting to the standard wing is said by insiders to cost around 0.2secs a lap. Technical director Pierre Wache insisted the fix is done. "It is a mechanical problem that we spot after the accident in Silverstone. We fixed it. It [the car] should be ready and bulletproof," he said, adding that Red Bull have discussed the wing with the FIA and hope to run a revised version at the Hungarian Grand Prix next weekend.

Further back, Racing Bulls brought one upgrade package for two drivers and settled the argument the honest way. Lindblad has the new parts this weekend because he out-qualified Lawson at the British Grand Prix, under an agreement the team struck beforehand, and team principal Alan Permane said Lawson will take the next upgrade later in the year.

So Friday closed with Mercedes holding the quickest car over one lap and the strongest completed long run, Alpine holding a chassis in pieces, and the champion holding a battery problem and a grid penalty. The table still says 25 points. What Friday said is that the leader has stopped drifting backwards, and at Spa that message tends to carry.

Sources: BBC Sport.