George Russell held off Mercedes team-mate Lewis Hamilton to take a stunning victory from sixth on the grid in an engrossing Belgian Grand Prix.
Russell put in an extraordinary drive to run an unusual one-stop strategy in a race that featured battles throughout the leading places.
He had to fend off a seven-time champion on tyres that were 15 laps fresher for five laps at the end off the race but pulled it off in impressive style, having called the strategy himself from the car.
Hamilton was closing in at nearly a second a lap in the final laps but, as so many other drivers found, overtaking was harder than expected and he could never quite get close enough to challenge.
As Russell clung on in the final two or three laps, McLaren’s Oscar Piastri closed in on Hamilton to set up a grandstand finish, and the three cars crossed the line nose to tail.
Seven seconds behind them, Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc – who had been passed by Piastri with nine laps to go around the outside of the Les Combes chicane – spent the closing laps fending off Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and the second McLaren of Lando Norris.
The three spent the final four laps neck and neck but Leclerc managed to hold his rivals at bay.
Behind Norris, Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz passed Red Bull’s Sergio Perez with five laps to go to raise further questions about Perez’s future.
Red Bull are expected to make a decision as to whether to drop him for the rest of the season over the forthcoming summer break – just two months after the Mexican signed a new two-year contract.
And dropping from second on the grid to finish at the back of the top four teams will have done Perez no favours.
No-one predicted a Mercedes one-two at the start of a race that many in F1 expected to devolve into a fight between the McLaren drivers and Verstappen, even though Norris and Piastri started fourth and fifth and Verstappen 11th.
But Hamilton moved into second place, past Perez, on the opening lap and followed Leclerc through the first stint.
An early pit stop on lap 11 put Hamilton into the lead by undercutting his rivals – stopping before them and gaining time on fresher tyres – and he held it until his second pit stop.
Remarkably, Russell stopped for his set of hard tyres one lap before Hamilton, and at that stage was expecting to run a two-stop like everyone else.
But he found that degradation was much less than expected and, as the time of his second pit stop closed in, he said to the team to consider going to the end.
As he pushed on, Russell became more and more convinced of his decision, and he committed.
It appeared initially as if Hamilton would catch and pass Russell, as he closed in quickly on his team-mate.
But overtaking proved to be harder than many expected and Russell was able to keep his place up the main overtaking zone from the first corner – through Eau Rouge and up the Kemmel straight to Les Combes – and he whooped with delight as he took the line.
“The tyre whisperer,” an impressed team boss Toto Wolff said to him over the radio.
Russell said: “We definitely didn’t predict this but the car was feeling awesome, the tyres were feeling great and I kept saying: ‘We can do the one-stop.’
“Well done to Lewis, he controlled the race, but a one-two was such a great way to go into the summer break.”
Hamilton said: “We had such a disaster on Friday, the car was nowhere. We made some changes, it was hard to know what it would be like in the wet yesterday, and the car was fantastic today.
“George did a great job going long on the tyres, every stint I had tyres left but the team pulled me in.”
Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso also employed a one-stop strategy to beat Alpine’s Esteban Ocon to ninth place.
Piastri punished in pit stop
Piastri said he believed the McLaren did not quite have the expected pace, but he did not help himself by overshooting his marks at his final pit stop and costing himself a couple of seconds.
Behind, Leclerc drove well in the unfenced Ferrari to fend off Verstappen and Norris in the closing laps.
Verstappen had been predicted by teams’ strategy models to come through and win the race but he found progress harder than many expected.
Norris, meanwhile, lost out on the first lap when he was forced a little wide at the first corner, got on to the gravel and dropped to seventh.
Not able to pass Sainz in front of him in the first stint, he was left with too much ground to make up to join the lead battle.
“Track position is king,” Piastri had said as he had some free air at the front between Hamilton’s final stop and his own, and that was the story of the race.
Russell took superb advantage of it to pull off probably the most unlikely victory of the season, and Mercedes’ third in four races, to set up a thrilling second half of the season when the championship resumes in the Netherlands on the last weekend in August.
By BBC News
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