It was a weekend for everybody in Spa. What should happen to be a exciting and joyous yield from a month of summer holidays turned into a heartbreaking weekend in which the Formula 2 driver Anthoine Hubert was fatally hurt in a accident on Saturday.
For Anthoine Hubert was also a star on the ladder to transplant 1. His Father Francois had been a rally driver however Anthoine took to the race track instead, winning the French F4 name in his first season of car racing.
F1 drivers: We hurried for Hubert
The Frenchman won the GP3 Championship last year and was rewarded with a contract using the Driver Academy of the Renault F1 team. Anthoine graduated to F2 and impressed winning at Monaco and on property in France, and was in line for a seat with a few of the top teams at the show for following year.
I didn’t know Anthoine – I had only met him a couple of times from the paddock with a few friends, but by most accounts he was a popular and lovely young man. I had been interviewing Charles Leclerc after Qualifying in the Skypad as soon as the accident occurred and neither of us knew how awful it was in fact that it was a friend of his that was involved. You were advised by the reaction from greats such as Alain Prost and Lewis Hamilton we are these days once we shed a driver.
There were a lot of people of the paddock – in our Sky F1 group – and on media who wondered how drivers can continue carrying the same risks and driving through the same corners at high speeds. This ability to detach from the world when you put your helmet on and concentrate is exactly what makes racing drivers unique.
I’ve been lucky that in 18 years of driving race cars, I have only once been engaged in a race where somebody was killed. That was Allan Simonsen in Le Mans in 2013 and I remember hearing about it as I had put my helmet on and get in the car and my team-mate Brendon Hartley came to shift . The fact that I had to drive off and remain focussed to the next 22 hours meant I – and the rest of the drivers at the race – managed to carry on driving flat out without thinking about the dangers we took.
It’s a defence mechanism which their mind is engaged in by most drivers. That feeling of’it will not happen to people’ but every so often, tragically the sport reminds us of the dangers lurking just around the corner.
If you speak with Sir Jackie Stewart concerning the era he hurried in, he’ll tell you that losing friends and rivals almost on a monthly basis wasn’t rare and it’s thanks to folks like the FIA that we have not lost as many drivers recently. There’ll be a full evaluation of course and there will be lessons that all people can learn but sadly motor sport is dangerous and also every motorist – Anthoine included – accepts every time we get in the cockpit of a racing car to the dangers.
As for the Grand Prix it was great to watch Charles Leclerc get the win he deserved. He has driven superbly after the disappointment of losing potential wins in Bahrain, Baku and Austria during this year and all, it was great to see him finally get one over the line. Charles was catastrophic in Qualifying, beating on his four-time World Champion team partner for its sixth consecutive Qualifying and this time with a substantial seven-tenths of a moment.
At the race that he managed to break apart from Sebastian with tyre administration and both pace. When Hamilton began to shut the gap down, but it all got a bit tricky at the end it turned out to be a performance.
More downforce was conducting compared to Ferrari and of course made it hard for them to overtake. It also meant so we needed a cat and mouse game in which a single car was faster than the other that they had very good speed.
There is not much more that Mercedes could have achieved – maybe a stop would have decreased the deficit to Leclerc by a few seconds but it is not really a race that they can be criticised by you around a great deal.
Vettel seemed to suffer from tyre degradation more than his young team-mate and I wonder if maybe Ferrari might have attempted to run a bit more downforce just to help him at the twistier middle sector of the lap because the advantage they had about the complete power run during the first industry was absolutely enormous.
Ferrari must have more of an advantage, when we visit Monza next weekend. There are corners than we have at Spa and much more importantly, just a couple of corners that’s the point where this Mercedes’ front end grip is really a step better than the red automobiles. They would need to do next 21, something quite wrong to not produce a victory!
Lando Norris was really unlucky to not have a good effect in 5th while the place was inherited by Alex Albon after a fantastic drive from 17th on the grid at the conclusion. The Thai driver did a fantastic job on his first outing with the team – he had been less than three tenths slower than Max Verstappen at Qualifying before he aborted his lap at the conclusion due to the grid penalties that was an excellent effort for his first session in the vehicle.
In the racehe bided his time on and then made solid progress in the second half to record a career best outcome.
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