F1: Mercedes team stunned by Verstappen's Spa dominance

Mercedes engineer Andrew Shovlin, and the rest of the German team, thought they would close the gap to Red Bull, and in particular the best driver in F1 today, Max Verstappen, at Spa.

Instead, Verstappen buried them.

Verstappen has passed every single test he’s been given. In the dry, in the wet, from pole, from the back of the grid, the fastest car or not, he’s done it all, he’s excelled in every sort of situation now. There’s an aura of inevitability about him that only Lewis Hamilton has and Michael Schumacher had.

“Well done to Max, and Red Bull, he was in a different league today, and would have won from anywhere on any strategy,” said Shovlin.

“It’s a bit of a shock how far ahead he has been this weekend; we’ve clearly got more work to do than we thought, fingers crossed he isn’t this fast around every track!

2022 Belgian Grand Prix, Saturday. Toto Wolff stares at the timing screen in complete dismay after Red Bull widened the gap to Mercedes- Jiri Krenek photo for Mercedes F1

“George drove good stints through the race, and had better pace than Carlos, he’d just taken a bit too much out of the tires in the final stint to make a pass. Lewis was unfortunate to be out of the race so early after a strong start. He’d not seen where Fernando was positioned turning into turn 5, and caused himself an early retirement; we’ve not yet got the car back, but hopefully, there’s not too much damage.

Lewis Hamilton flies into the air after pinching Fernando Alonso in Turn 5 on lap 1 of the Belgian Grand Prix 2022, Sunday – LAT Images

“The weekend overall has been tough. We’d hoped to move forward here with our updates, and whilst it seems that Ferrari are closer to us on race pace, Red Bull are clearly not.

“We have struggled with the various compromises the car has here, much more so than the races leading into the summer break, and that’s definitely made our lives more difficult.

“In many ways that has given some useful learning, the car isn’t yet performing well enough over a range of tracks, so it’s clear we need to widen the working window.

“We were also poor on the single lap which is another area we have to focus on; with a bit more track temperature today, the warm-up was much better, but it’s been a recurrent issue over a range of conditions, and circuits, and something we have to improve.

“We’ve got a couple of days to regroup, and plan for Zandvoort, it’s got some similar challenges with very fast corners so hopefully we can make a bit of progress having analyzed the data from this weekend.”

Mark C. reporting for AutoRacing1.com