F1 Focus: Russell ready to lead, Perez fails to save his seat
It's fair to say that the first half of the 2024 season ended in style, with Spa serving up a Belgian Grand Prix so thrilling that nobody wanted a summer break at the end of it.
Well, maybe except for Red Bull, with the race showing just how far the reigning champions have fallen in the last year. In 2022 and 2023, Max Verstappen started outside of the top five and won with ease, whereas this year he started outside of the top five and barely made it back into it.
The higher-ups in the sport will be struggling to hide their delight at that, with the season quickly becoming one of the best of the last decade as a result. We're now regularly heading into races not knowing which one of four teams will win it, and that's how it should be.
Mercedes were the ones to come out on top in the final round of the opening half of the campaign, and these are my main takeaways from Spa.
Russell ready to lead Mercedes
He may have had the win taken from him due to a miscalculation from the team that caused his car to be underweight, resulting in a disqualification, but that takes nothing away from what was probably the best drive of George Russell's Formula 1 career.
From the moment he joined the grid in 2019, it was abundantly clear that Russell had the outright pace to one day fight for world championships, but was lacking in other areas. In Belgium, he showed that's no longer the case.
His race was about as complete a performance as you'll ever see from a driver. He had the presence of mind to suggest an audacious one-stop strategy that nobody else at the front was brave enough to attempt and then executed that strategy perfectly with some remarkable tyre management. To make the rubber last and still be as quick as he was is hugely impressive.
He's been guilty of being too aggressive in the past, of simply driving as hard and as fast as he can and not thinking too much about the bigger picture. At Spa, he did the opposite, showing more than ever that he's maturing into the complete driver Mercedes will need to lead them once Lewis Hamilton leaves for Ferrari at the end of the year.
It's a drive that will make Toto Wolff very much comfortable with the idea of heading into 2025 with youngster Andrea Kimi Antonelli as Hamilton's replacement and Russell as the team's main man.
In fact, it feels like the only thing that would stop that being the Mercedes lineup next year now is a certain Dutchman...
Move to Mercedes might make sense for Max
When Wolff and Mercedes began to publicly flirt with the idea of making a move for Max Verstappen at the start of the season, it felt like little more than a pipe dream for them, but the Red Bull man will be spending his summer break wondering if he should make it a reality.
The Red Bull camp hasn't been a happy one since Christian Horner's alleged misconduct drove a wedge between himself and just about everyone including, very publicly, Verstappen's father. However, the cons of that volatile atmosphere were outweighed by the fact that the Dutchman had the best car on the grid. That's not the case anymore.
His growing discontent with the situation he's in there has been clear for everyone to see in recent weeks with him getting hugely frustrated and being extremely critical of his team on both the team radio and in interviews with the press.
What's more, Mercedes along with McLaren are the ones that have capitalised on Red Bull's struggles, winning three of the last four races, developing their car and executing their strategies excellently, with the exception of the weight issues with Russell's car last time out.
There's also plenty of talk going around the paddock that Mercedes will produce the best engine on the grid when the new regulations are introduced in 2026. Carlos Sainz seemingly choosing to sign for the Mercedes-supplied Williams rather than Audi and Renault thinking of going with Mercedes engines rather than producing their own for Alpine very much suggests that will be the case.
So, should Verstappen stick or twist? Only those inside the paddock with access to far more information than me will know the answer to that, but Verstappen will undoubtedly spend much of his summer break trying to figure it out.
Perez puts the final nail in his own coffin
Regardless of the decision he makes, Verstappen will be a Red Bull driver until the end of 2024 at the least, but I don't think the same can be said for his teammate, with Sergio Perez's falling to take his last chance to convince Red Bull to keep him beyond the summer break.
Qualifying was positive with him going third-quickest, allowing him to start the race in second thanks to Verstappen's grid penalty. Things went downhill as soon as the action got underway on Sunday though with him losing out to Hamilton at the start and continuing to drop down the field for the remainder of the day.
Despite starting eight places ahead of Verstappen, he finished three places and 34 seconds behind the Dutchman and was also soundly beaten by every other driver in a comparable piece of machinery. As a result, he's now behind all of them in the driver's standings except Russell, and that's only because of the Brit's harsh disqualification.
The contract Perez signed earlier this year reportedly stated that the team could drop him if he wasn't within 100 points of his teammate at the end of the first half of the season, so with that gap at 146, his time with the team looks to have come to an end.
As for who will replace him, it looks to be a two-horse race between Daniel Ricciardo and Liam Lawson, with British publication PlanetF1 reporting that a shootout between the two will be held at Imola this week.
If I were Horner, I'd probably give the nod to Ricciardo initially to see if the driver who was one of the best on the grid when at Red Bull previously is still in there and give Lawson the chance to get settled into Formula 1 in the lower pressured environment of sister-team RB.
Either way, for the rest of 2024 at least, it looks like there won't be any room in the inn for Perez.
