Formula 1 | Place in the second half of the season

They spent time with their families, returned home or visited other places. But the summer break is over. The drivers are back at work in Belgium, where the second half of the Formula 1 season will begin on Sunday. A look at the championship fight – which is almost no longer one – between the top teams.

Katherine Harvey Pinard
The Press

Everything is rolling at Red Bull

Despite two retirements in the first three races of the season, Max Verstappen is virtually flawless so far. The defending champion has triumphed on 8 of the 13 circuits.

At the start of the season, we believed in a neck-and-neck battle for the championship between the two young drivers Verstappen and Charles Leclerc. But Ferrari failed to keep pace and Verstappen only widened his lead to hold 80 points more than the Monegasque heading into the Belgian Grand Prix.

Confident and unwavering, the 23-year-old Dutchman takes nothing for granted, but he is establishing himself as a great F1 driver.

As for Sergio Pérez, he is having arguably one of the best seasons of his career, but the five races before the break proved more difficult. If the 32-year-old Mexican claimed, during his time in Montreal, to be able to become world champion, we have to admit that the task will be great to get there.

Pérez has a victory, won in Monaco, and five second places so far. He is in third place among the drivers, 5 small points behind Leclerc.

Red Bull has something to congratulate itself on so far, both for its car and for its strategies – despite a few slackenings in terms of reliability. The dice are not cast, but let’s say that the team is in a good position to win everything, with nearly 100 points ahead of Ferrari in the constructors’ championship.

The vagaries of the Scuderia

Charles Leclerc got off to a hot start with two wins in three races. He probably drives the fastest car on the grid. But too often he fell victim to Ferrari’s reliability issues and questionable strategies, much to his dismay. He therefore only triumphed once in the following 10 races.

Leclerc, to whom the holidays have undoubtedly done the greatest good, drives the good single-seater to hope to climb the steep slope which stands in front of him for the last nine races. It will be difficult, but possible. He will have to go one race at a time and avoid pilot errors, which notably cost him victory in France.

He also has a teammate in excellent shape, but who has also experienced a roller coaster of emotions. Carlos Sainz Jr., who struggled to adapt to his new car at the start of the season, picked up his first career victory in Great Britain. But he has been forced to retire four times this season. The Spaniard ranks fifth among the drivers, with 2 points less than George Russell and 10 more than Lewis Hamilton.

If Ferrari wants to see one of its drivers at the top, in 2022 or in the next few years, it will have to improve its reliability and make better decisions.

The Silver Arrows are back

What a story Mercedes has this season. From the start of the campaign, the team experienced more trouble than the others with porpoising – this aerodynamic phenomenon which causes jolts in single-seaters.

Seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton clinched an unexpected third place in the first race of the campaign, before plummeting in 10^e place in Saudi Arabia. In Baku, he struggled to extricate himself from his vehicle at the end of the race due to back pain from porpoising.

The 37-year-old Briton has therefore yet to win a race, an unusual fact in his case, but things have recovered in the last five events before the summer break. He finished on the podium in each of them. Finally, a little consistency.

His team-mate, George Russell, has adapted better to his new car. The young 24-year-old driver ended up in the top 5 in every race so far, except in Great Britain, when the accident occurred which could have claimed the life of AlphaTauri driver Zhou Guanyu.

Mercedes are unlikely to win a ninth straight constructors’ championship and still have some work to do to keep pace with Red Bull and Ferrari. But she can rejoice to have regained a certain constancy; its two drivers were on the podium in France and Hungary before the break. The team finally accuses only 30 points on the Scuderia at this stage.

Stroll and Latifi trailing behind

It’s complicated for the only two Canadians in Formula 1. Lance Stroll, at Aston Martin, is at 18^e rank of pilots; he collected just one point in four races. With the retirement of Sebastian Vettel, he will count on the double world champion Fernando Alonso as a teammate next season, we learned recently. As for Nicholas Latifi, he did not succeed in any top 10 so far. He will have to find a way to do better in the second half of the season if he wants to keep his seat at Williams.