Abyssal gap
Aston Martin and Honda experienced at Spa-Francorchamps, in qualifying, yet another chapter of their nightmare first half of the season. However, this Belgian round was perhaps a more embarrassing and humiliating lapse than others because the characteristics of the Ardennes track, combined with the total lack of developments of the power unit and the car – the team aims to bring a sort of version B of the AMR26 to Hungary next week – made the gap of the green cars from the rest of the grid even heavier than usual.
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The best time set by Fernando Alonso in 1:50.002 turned out to be 5.641 seconds slower than Kimi Antonelli’s pole position; Stroll was 5.816 seconds behind the World Championship leader.
Even Cadillac, which is still clearly the second to last force on the field, seems to be running a different championship compared to the Silverstone cars: Valtteri Bottas, with the best of the American cars, beat Alonso by over two seconds in Q1. In fact, the F2 pole position set yesterday by Rafael Camara was just over 6 seconds off Alonso’s time; thus the Asturian’s time was almost halfway between the F1 pole position and that of the junior category.
Honda’s words
In all this, Honda could only acknowledge the announced disaster. Shintaro Orihara, Trackside General Manager and Chief Engineer of Honda, stated: “We already knew before arriving here that this circuit would represent an extremely challenging test for the power unit group, so our positions after qualifying do not surprise us. We find some consolation in the fact that, together with Aston Martin, we are improving race after race in terms of energy management.”
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