A Belgian Grand Prix weekend that extends Kimi Antonelli's lead from 25 to 45 points, and one where George Russell's season arguably hit a new low.

Those Mercedes Formula 1 team-mates are perfectly opposite right now: one looks to have everything working in perfect, polished harmony; the other can't work out where his issues are, if it's him or the car, if he should be doing better, or he's being robbed.

With so much to talk about between the Mercedes drivers, they occupy most of our attention in our post-race Spa verdict.

Some soul-crushing battles

Josh Suttill

Full credit to Kimi Antonelli. Another superb victory that's felt inevitable ever since Friday practice. It's absolutely his championship to lose.

But my biggest takeaway was what the 2026 regulations have done to races at Spa.

We know qualifying was...well, just look at the replies under the pole lap onboard that F1's own account shared on various social media channels.

But I had higher hopes for the race. Unfortunately, it was deeply underwhelming.

Lap one, we had the usual exciting run-up to the Kemmel Straight, but it almost felt ridiculously random with multiple drivers running out of energy before the braking zone.

As we've seen before in 2026, the pass for the lead was a simple drive-by on the straight. Yes, there were plenty of DRS drive-bys before this year, particularly at Spa, but it feels even more limp now.

Plus, the passes into Eau Rouge/Raidillon - previously a sign of immense bravery; think Mark Webber on Fernando Alonso in 2011 - are now just an easy overtake on an energy-starved car.

And we're still sorely missing proper battery graphics. So many of these battles would be far more interesting if we actually knew how much battery each driver had.

Right now, at tracks like Spa, fans are being left with an underwhelming racing product without the proper information they need to understand what's underpinning it.

There's a relentless consistency to Antonelli

Jon Noble

F1 may have become (for better or worse) a battery world championship, but that should take nothing away from the job Antonelli is doing right now.

As his rivals - and especially team-mate Russell - often struggle to understand exactly what they are missing to get themselves fully on top of energy-management quirks, Antonelli is getting on with it in his own quiet way.

After a run where mechanical problems in Spain and Britain cost him a chunk of points, his stellar Spa weekend was the perfect example of how well he is executing what he has underneath him.

Yes, the 2026 cars may not be as fun to drive as their predecessors, and some counterintuitive approaches are needed to get around deployment strangeness and tricky on-board algorithms, but Antonelli's job is not to be thrilled by the car nor rate his job on how good the current ruleset is.

His role is to go out there and make whatever he is given go as fast as it possibly can.

The way Antonelli is delivering and adapting on the hoof is impressive, and being so in control of an overly complicated and baffling ruleset points to a second half of the season that should be just as strong as the first.

The title is not won yet; especially as those reliability niggles cannot be guaranteed to have been sorted.

But there seems to be such a relentless consistency to Antonelli's ability to maximise pace now that, if his car can hold itself together, it is going to be very hard for anyone else to stop him ending the year as champion.

Picture-in-picture doesn't work

Samarth Kanal

Antonelli cruised to that Belgian GP win after an unfortunate lap-one incident that took out Russell, albeit this was a racing incident that shouldn't have resulted in a penalty for Lewis Hamilton.

There were some fun-looking overtakes through Eau Rouge and Raidillon and a couple of VSCs, but nothing to vindicate this set of F1 regulations.

Most egregious of all was the race-long Alpine vs Racing Bulls battle being relegated to that picture-in-picture view, which is way too small to be useful.

F1 needs to let that tiny screen in the leaderboard go - no matter how much time it might have taken to design - and split the screen into two, or just regain the courage to show replays during the race.

Feel sorry for Russell

Jack Benyon

I know Russell isn't the most popular driver in the world, and I also know as a driver, it's up to him to maximise his chances to beat his team-mate.

But, ultimately, I can't help but feel sorry for him. A driver who has been patient, paid his dues, waited for this moment and then has been presented with a formula that is not all about driver talent, and he's being beaten by drivers who, partly, can game the formula better. (Unless he does have an undiagnosed issue with his car, which is another mitigating factor and even Mercedes can't work out the answer to.)

Don't get me wrong, if the FIA decides the drivers will swap to tractors for the next race, then it's up to the teams and drivers to extract the maximum out of them.

But, are you really telling me that Antonelli is driving better than Russell this year in a traditional way we would all recognise pre-2026? I don't think anyone can know that, because all of the drivers are driving with the computer game assists turned on and ChatGPT sat in the passenger seat.

I think drivers should have to adapt, but they should have to do so with elements of driving, not elements of pointless technology.

And by the way, none of this is a slight on Antonelli. But what if Antonelli is driving as good as or better than Russell? Again, we don't know, and we're being robbed of that knowledge because of these awful rules which are especially exposed at tracks like Spa.

This wasn't really a fight

Eden Hannigan

I’m almost at the point where I feel like it's a foregone conclusion that Antonelli will turn up and be the fastest driver on track every single weekend.

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean he will run out victorious - as we saw in Silverstone - but it's a pretty good indicator of just how in control he looks.

Let's make one thing clear: there was never going to be a fight for the victory here. Even when Leclerc was leading by two and a half seconds thanks to good Ferrari strategy, it felt obvious that the Mercedes would swoop in and power past one way or another.

Antonelli did just that, in an underwhelming race-winning manoeuvre that highlighted exactly why the drivers have been less-than-enthused with driving on this track with these regulations.

I just feel disappointed and slightly naive in thinking that Spa might have been different from the rest. Other than a messy first lap where George Russell had his title hopes dealt another blow (on a weekend that left him even more confused by his struggles), I didn't find myself getting too animated about anything else.

It's a shame. The only thing that makes it stand out from the other races this season is just how beloved Spa has been, but these rules have done this circuit no favours at all.