Not Good Enough

By Rudy Falco | July 20, 2026

SPA, BELGIUM - JULY 19: George Russell of Great Britain and Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team walks away from his car after a crash and retirement on the opening lap during the F1 Grand Prix of Belgium at Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps on July 19, 2026 in Spa, Belgium. (Photo by Clive Mason/Getty Images)

George Russell has said "not good enough" so many times this season that it should be stitched onto his race suit. He said it again at Spa, and this time nobody could argue with him. Thirty seconds into a Belgian Grand Prix that could have relaunched his title challenge, running behind two Ferraris and level with the two men he actually needed to beat, Lewis Hamilton's Ferrari understeered into the back of him at Turn 6 and put him in the gravel for the afternoon. His race ended on lap one. His championship took the hit with it. He went into the weekend twenty-five points behind Kimi Antonelli. He left it fifty behind, and whatever momentum he'd built at Silverstone is gone.

Antonelli made sure of it. He took pole by the better part of three tenths, lost the lead to Max Verstappen at Eau Rouge on the opening lap, and got it right back down the Kemmel Straight before the first corner of lap two. He spent the rest of the afternoon managing a race that briefly threatened to slip away when a Virtual Safety Car let Charles Leclerc pit for free and rejoin in front. Antonelli reeled him in anyway, made the pass stick at the end of Kemmel on lap thirty-four, survived a late Safety Car restart with Leclerc still in his mirrors, and crossed the line 1.952 seconds clear for his sixth win of the season. "I'm very happy, very happy, very satisfied with the win," he said afterward. "Was a hard-fought one, not straightforward at all." He talked through the setup work behind it, a lower-downforce package that had the team scratching its head in first practice before they walked it back toward the old rear wing and found the combination that worked. Then he put the season in context. "Last year was my darkest moment of the season and this year feels like a redemption. But it's great to be back on the top step."

Leclerc's second place, on a circuit he openly admits should not favor a Ferrari, is the more instructive result of the two. "It was quite an eventful race, but I'm quite happy with the results," he said. "Honestly on a track like this where we expected to struggle, it wasn't a given." He named Spa and Silverstone as the two circuits on the wrong side of the SF-26's window, then finished first and second at both of them in consecutive weekends, the second time by 1.9 seconds after a fight he nearly won. "The tow was very powerful," he said of Antonelli's Mercedes bearing down on him in the closing laps. "It was hard to break away." Antonelli agreed with him almost word for word afterward, telling Leclerc the Mercedes really had been quicker while following. Two drivers had an honest conversation about a gap of under two seconds, and it said more about where this fight actually sits than either car's raw pace.

SPA, BELGIUM - JULY 19: Race winner Andrea Kimi Antonelli of Italy and Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team Second placed Charles Leclerc of Monaco and Scuderia Ferrari and Third placed Max Verstappen of the Netherlands and Oracle Red Bull Racing on the podium during the F1 Grand Prix of Belgium at Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps on July 19, 2026 in Spa, Belgium. (Photo by Clive Rose/Getty Images)

Verstappen took third, and the more interesting story is what didn't happen to him. After two straight weekends of a rear wing that failed to close and put him in the gravel, first in Austrian qualifying and then again at Silverstone with four laps to go, the wing behaved itself this time. He led briefly off the start, lost it back to Antonelli, dropped behind Leclerc under the VSC sequence, and brought the car home clean. "A little bit unlucky with the VSC compared to Charles," he said. "But the rest, yeah, just tried to do my race. For us in a weekend that was quite straightforward, to be P3 I think is a good result." After two weekends where his own car put him at risk, a Sunday where the only complaint was strategic timing counts as a good one. Team boss Laurent Mekies called the car "getting stronger and stronger," and for once the components held up their end.

Hamilton took fourth, and his account of the day cuts both ways. He served a five-second penalty for the Russell contact at his first stop and later drew a separate €30,000 team fine, not a further sporting penalty, after his front jack man got caught out during a pit release and Hamilton felt the car clip him on the way out. "My heart sank," is how he described that moment, relieved the mechanic walked away unhurt. On the Russell collision itself he offered no apology. "Ultimately sorry for George because that's obviously ended his race," he said. "But I do agree that it was a racing incident. It's not like I went aggressive and was misplaced or anything like that." He also argued the contact cost him more than it looks on paper. "I think my race pace was strong today, and I think without the damage, and probably without yesterday, we could have been fighting for the win." A Ferrari one-two turned into fourth and second, sandwiched around a Mercedes, and Maranello still leaves the Ardennes with more points than it arrived with.

The stewards' handling of that contact became its own subplot on the podcast circuit, and not everyone agreed with the verdict. David Coulthard, on Up To Speed, allowed that "the reality is someone has to be responsible for the contact, and unless the driver in front is closing down the apex, then the proportion of the blame has to lie with the car behind," landing on Hamilton's side of it but calling the move "more sort of clumsy than anything else." His co-host Naomi pushed back on consistency rather than the call itself, pointing at a separate first-lap incident between Oscar Piastri and Leclerc that drew no penalty at all. "So I don't know, sometimes I feel like there's a slight lack of consistency in some of these decisions, but yeah, I felt it was harsh on Lewis and lenient on Charles." Alex Brundle, on F1 Nation, was fully in Russell's corner. "It's definitely not George's fault. I don't agree with the steward's take on it on this particular occasion just because it's the first lap." Russell pointed at something stranger underneath the contact, a battery that wasn't delivering. "I came out of turn one, for whatever reason I was thirty to forty percent down on my battery, and I just got totally swamped up by three cars." Naomi and Coulthard described a Mercedes power unit with what Naomi called "some sort of sensitivity" to the harvesting procedure through the corner, one that "has quite a detrimental impact" when a driver doesn't nail it, and one Mercedes has not solved. Russell's own summary of his season needed no translation. "It's one thing after another after another after another. Not good enough on all regards, so try and reset again."

McLaren's weekend deserves its own paragraph of misery, because a team that won last season's constructors' championship, with Norris and Piastri fighting each other for the drivers' title down to the final race, is now finishing races like this. Norris took a ten-place grid penalty for a fourth battery of the season, started thirteenth, drove into the points at seventh, and set the fastest lap of the race, a bright spot inside a day he described in withering terms. "We should have been a lot better today, honestly," he said. "The pace was easily good enough for a potential podium. We just had a terrible pit stop, we were unlucky with the VSCs as well." Piastri had it worse. He took front-wing damage from contact with Racing Bulls' Liam Lawson early on, lost the balance of his car for the rest of the first stint, and salvaged fifth on pace alone. "That made things definitely more difficult, and I struggled a lot for the rest of that stint," he said. Team principal Andrea Stella admitted afterward that caution cost McLaren more than it needed to, saying the team "could have been bolder" with Norris's strategy. A team that won the constructors' title twelve months ago is now explaining, race after race, why the result didn't match the pace.

There were better stories further down the order, and Isack Hadjar's was the best of the day. He took a thirty-place grid penalty for his fifth power unit of the season and used his qualifying laps instead to tow teammate Verstappen to a front-row start, backing off through Stavelot twice so Verstappen could draft past him to the final chicane. "The right thing to do," is how both men described the arrangement afterward. Running from the back once the lights went out, Hadjar turned a lap-one Safety Car into the strangest strategic gift of the weekend, pitting for mediums under caution and pitting again a lap later for hards, which effectively converted two stops into one long final stint. He picked off cars all afternoon and crossed the line sixth. "It was just a perfect execution and I'm very happy," he said. Gabriel Bortoleto banked eighth for Audi, back-to-back points finishes in front of more than five hundred Audi employees who made the trip from Switzerland to watch. Arvid Lindblad brought his Racing Bulls car home ninth in his rookie season, and Franco Colapinto rounded out the top ten for Alpine. Lance Stroll's Aston Martin retired after twenty-five laps with a gearbox failure, the latest entry in a season of Honda-related reliability trouble that Adrian Newey's technical team has yet to solve, and Sergio Perez's Cadillac joined him on the sidelines with a mechanical issue of its own. Carlos Sainz took a grid drop of his own for a battery change, the fifth driver forced into a power-unit-related penalty this season alone, a reminder that the most aggressive electrification rules in the sport's history are chewing through components faster than most teams priced in.

SPA, BELGIUM - JULY 19: Oscar Piastri of Australia driving the (81) McLaren MCL40 Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton of Great Britain driving the (44) Scuderia Ferrari SF-26 battle for track position during the F1 Grand Prix of Belgium at Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps on July 19, 2026 in Spa, Belgium. (Photo by Michael Potts/LAT Images)

The standings now read like a course correction rather than a tightening race. Antonelli leads on two hundred and four points. Hamilton has jumped to second on one hundred fifty-nine, ahead of Russell, third on one hundred fifty-four despite scoring nothing at Spa. Leclerc's win-and-podium stretch has him fourth on one hundred twenty-six, Norris fifth on one hundred four, Piastri sixth on ninety-two, Verstappen seventh on ninety-one. Mercedes has extended its constructors' lead to three hundred fifty-eight, Ferrari has closed to two hundred eighty-five, and McLaren sits a distant third on one hundred ninety-six. Antonelli's cushion is now forty-five points before the season has even reached its halfway pause. The intra-Mercedes battle that defined the spring is on hold, and Russell needs a response before the sport disappears for three weeks.

He will not get much time to find one. Formula 1 heads to the Hungaroring outside Budapest for the Hungarian Grand Prix, round eleven, the last race before a three-week summer break. There is no long straight here to paper over a car's flaws. Fourteen corners are packed into four and a half kilometers, six left, eight right, most arriving in quick succession with barely a breath between them, and the whole lap is a test of mechanical grip and aerodynamic efficiency at low speed rather than outright horsepower. Pirelli has brought its softest allocation of the year, the C3, C4 and C5, which points toward heavy degradation and a strategic window favoring two stops over one. Six braking zones per lap, ambient heat forecast around thirty-one degrees, and nowhere on the circuit for a car to cool its brakes. Overtaking is a rumor here even in a normal year, and in 2026, with the active-aero wings that replaced DRS having almost nothing to work with on a circuit this short of straights, position after qualifying is close to destiny. Verstappen's exit clause window closes with this weekend too. He sits seventh in the championship, nowhere near the top two his contract needed him inside by the summer break, and he does not have to say what he's doing about it until October.

My call: Antonelli wins it, because he's been the best qualifier on the grid all season and a circuit this dependent on Saturday plays straight into that. Russell takes second, using the frustration from Spa to keep the intra-team fight alive rather than let his teammate disappear over the horizon. For third, I like Norris. McLaren has the best brake-cooling package in the field, and six heavy braking zones with nowhere to cool down is exactly the kind of examination that rewards it. Ferrari's momentum makes them the obvious spoiler, and either Leclerc or Hamilton finishing ahead of Norris wouldn't shock anyone. But I'm sticking with the brakes.

Antonelli. Russell. Norris.