Not the falling rain or the cool Ardennes conditions could cool Max Verstappen’s frustration as he sat in pit lane during what should have been the Belgian Grand Prix.
The start to the race has been suspended on the formation lap due to heavy rain. Drivers wouldn’t get back in their cars for another 80 minutes, and the racing wouldn’t start until another 10 minutes after that.
It took just seven racing laps for the field to begin switching to dry tyres.
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The problem wasn’t the water so much as it was the spray. Formula 1 cars kick up prolific amounts of water at full speed, and at the fastest parts of the circuit they were generating a shroud of mist that reduced visibility to a metre or two.
The Dutchman — and the sopping-wet fans in the grandstands — had 165 minutes to contemplate the issue before Oscar Piastri eventually took the chequered flag at 5:45pm.
He didn’t hold back in a brief media session between jumping out of the car and dashing for his flight home.
“It was not even raining,” he said, per The Race, protesting that he would have got the race underway “straight away” at 3pm as planned.
“Of course between turns 1 and 5 there was quite a bit of water, but if you do two or three laps behind the safety car, then it would have been a lot more clear, and the rest of the track was anyway ready to go.
“This also didn’t make sense. Then it’s better to say, ‘You know what? Let’s wait until it’s completely dry and then we just start on slicks,’ because this is not really wet-weather racing for me.”
Verstappen gave the low-visibility justification short shrift.
“It would only be for a few laps, and the more you run, it will be much better.
“And if you can’t see, you can always lift.”
‘Miles earlier!’: Max on rolling start | 01:02
‘RUINED A NICE CLASSIC WET RACE’
Verstappen was motivated to race in the wet. He’d made compromises to his car specifically in anticipation of rain, and waiting until the weather subsided neutralised what could have been a key advantage. Instead he got stuck behind Charles Leclerc for the entire race.
“It was a choice that we made with the set-up of the car. It was then the wrong one because they didn’t allow us to race in the wet,” he said, per ESPN.
“Once we got to the dry tyres, we were just too slow on the straight, and then with the general balance problems that I already have with this car, it made everything just a bit worse.
“You make all the decisions based on wet racing, so then also it just ruins your whole race a bit.
“It just ruined a nice classic wet race as well.”
Lewis Hamilton also lamented the lack of wet running for similar reasons. The Briton had qualified badly and elected to start from pit lane in part to set up his car with more downforce in the rain.
He was 18th at the rolling start and ferocious in the wet, passing five cars in seven laps before stopping for slicks.
He shook out seventh following the stops but then couldn’t pass Alex Albon’s Williams due to his lack of straight-line speed, a problem exacerbated by Ferrari’s decision to underfuel him on the assumption that the race would be wet.
Hamilton seemed to take issue mostly with the slow decision-making about getting the race back underway and the subsequent four laps behind the safety car that took the place of a standing start.
“We started the race a little bit too late, I would say,” he said, per Autosport. “I kept shouting, ‘It’s ready to go, it’s ready to go’ and they kept going round and round and round.
“I think they were probably overreacting from the last race where we asked them not to restart the race too early because visibility was bad, and I think this weekend they just went a bit too much the other way because we didn’t need a rolling start.”
As is always the case in motorsport, it can be difficult to separate a competitor’s vested interest from their professional opinion.
But in this case Verstappen — and Hamilton to a lesser extent — was in as tiny minority.
Piastri picks off Norris in first lap | 00:32
DRIVERS CALL FOR CAUTION
The overwhelming majority of drivers identified low visibility as a serious issue during the formation lap.
“Mate, I literally can’t see anything,” Liam Lawson radioed to his engineer.
“This is totally blind,” Lance Stroll said.
In team radio compiled by Racefans all but three drivers complained about low visibility. The three who didn’t note the spray said nothing at all.
Even Verstappen noted “quite bad spray” down the Kemmel straight before expressing his disappointment over the suspended start.
Only Verstappen and Albon suggested the call to delay the start was too cautious — though Albon said it would have been better to continue behind the safety car to help dry the track. Verstappen was alone in thinking that the race should have started as scheduled.
But George Russell, a director of the Grand Prix Drivers Association, said it would have been “stupidity” to try to race after the first formation alp.
“As a racer you always want to get going, you love driving in the rain,” he said, per the Guardian. “But the fact is when you’re doing over 200 miles an hour out of Eau Rouge, you literally cannot see anything, you may as well have a blindfold on.
“It isn’t racing; it’s just stupidity.
“Considering it was clearly going to be dry from 4pm onwards, they made the right call.”
Further, however, was that the drivers had asked for exactly this sort of caution during their regular briefing session with race director Rui Marques.
Those calls followed the rain-hit British Grand Prix, where drivers felt race control had been too slow to react to worsening conditions, leading to several crashes and multiple safety cars.
“We sat down and spoke about it, and the drivers said in the last race we shouldn’t have restarted,” Hamilton said, per ESPN. “So I think they just focused on visibility.
“As soon as someone said up ahead [that] visibility was really bad … I think they just waited just to be sure.
“I think they still did a good job. Of course we did miss some of the extreme wet racing, which I think would have been nice, but for some reason the spray here is … like going through fog.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do to try and fix it.”
That last line from Hamilton is perhaps most illuminating, because racing in the wet — and racing in Belgium in particular — has become a contentious and growing problem for Formula 1.
Rosberg grills Jos: “Now you’re quiet?” | 00:14
SPA IS UNIQUELY DANGEROUS
Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps deserves specific mention here.
The famous circuit has a long history of danger and death, and it was a major battleground during the first big pushes for improved safety, with driver-led boycotts held in 1969 and 1971.
The Belgian Grand Prix was subsequently relocated to other tracks until the 1980s, by which time Spa-Francorchamps had been redesigned into its current configuration.
But its tragic history stretches into the modern age too.
Formula 2 racer Anthoine Hubert was killed in a disaster at the 2019 Belgian Grand Prix. Giuliano Alesi lost control of his car after picking up a puncture climbing Eau Rouge, sending him into the barriers at Raidillon. Following drivers scrambled to avoid debris, and in the chaos Hubert hit Ralph Boschung and was in turn hit by Juan Manuel Correa in a 220-kilometre-per-hour, 82g crash.
Frenchman Hubert, 22 years old, died from his injuries. Correa suffered two broken legs and a spinal injury and had to be placed on life support in an induced coma after falling into acute respiratory failure as a result of the high-energy crash. He returned to racing two years later.
Tragedy would strike again just two years later, when 18-year-old Dilano van ’t Hoff lost his life at the circuit racing in the Formula Regional European Championship.
The Dutchman lost control of his car and spun in heavy wet conditions after cresting Raidillon, only a little further up from the scene of Hubert’s crash.
He was T-boned by another car, unsighted by the spray, at high speed in what turned into a multi-car crash.
Van ’t Hoff died from his injuries.
The Eau Rouge-Raidillon complex is one of motorsport’s most renowned, but the speed at which it’s taken and the moment of lightness as a car crests the top of the hill make it incredibly dangerous too.
The topography at that part of the circuit means run-off cannot be extended, and while the barriers have been redesigned to reduce the likelihood of a crashed car bouncing back onto the circuit, the scope to improve safety without altering the fundamental nature of the corner is limited.
Reducing grip and visibility enhances those risks considerably.
“On a track like this with what happened historically, I think you cannot forget about it,” Charles Leclerc said. “For that reason, I’d rather be safe than too early.”
Marquez makes it five wins on the bounce | 00:55
AN INTRACTABLE PROBLEM
But F1’s rain problem exists separate to the narrow and undulating Spa-Francorchamps. After all, we know now that drivers felt the deluge at flat and featureless Silverstone had been significant enough to warrant a suspension, which in part triggered the hyper-vigilance in Belgium.
At Silverstone, as in Spa, the problem was blinding spray that made racing impossible.
It’s become increasingly serious in recent years.
In part that’s because of this generation of ground-effect car.
Ground-effect aerodynamics were reintroduced to Formula 1 in a bid to improve racing by reducing the effect of dirty air. They achieved this by ejecting air from the floor high above the following car, away from its bodywork.
But water follows the same path. In a wet race the rain is ejected into the air, where it creates a blanket of spray that befogs following drivers.
The problem has become worse as the floors have become more sophisticated.
The tyres are also to some extent culpable. In recent years Formula 1 introduced wider tyres whose larger footprints disperse more water, exacerbating the problem.
This is also why Pirelli’s full wet tyre is so rarely seen. By the time there’s enough water on track to consider using it, the spray is so bad that the session is guaranteed to be called off.
The problem came to a head in 2021, when that year’s Belgian Grand Prix was farcically declared complete after two laps behind the safety car, the bare minimum required under regulations to pay out points.
In the aftermath the FIA investigated ways to reduce spray from the tyres. It came up with a wheel cover that could be attached to the cars in wet conditions as a sort of mud guard.
It was put through its paces last year and rejected. Even a second version, which was more impractical to use but more effective, made an insufficient difference to be worth pursuing.
The biggest problem remains aerodynamics, which is why the problem has become intractable.
Formula 1 is an aerodynamics category. The more downforce you have, the faster the car goes. But the more downforce you have, the worse problems you have with spray.
Combine that with open, fat wheels, and you practically have a rolling fog machine.
It will be interesting to see whether the problem is improved next season. While on the one hand a move away from ground effect should make a positive difference, the 2021 Belgian Grand Prix was run under the previous set of rules, albeit those cars were generating significant downforce by then, the last year of that rule set.
Assuming Formula 1 wants to continue with a similar level of performance — and that, after all, is the point of F1 — solving its wet-weather problems will need a whole-of-sport solution.
Until it finds that answer, Formula 1 will continue to be its own worst enemy in the wet.