Slumping Max Verstappen Expected to Take 10-place Grid Penalty at F1 Belgian Grand Prix

• Max Verstappen comes into this week's F1 Belgian Grand Prix with a 76-point lead over Lando Norris in the championship.

• Verstappen's quest this week will likely come from deep in the field, as he's facing a 10-place grid penalty for a fifth engine change of the season.

• In 2022, Verstappen won from 14th on the grid at Spa, and last year won from sixth, with victory margins of 17 and 22 seconds, respectively.

This weekend’s Belgian Grand Prix at the fabulous Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps is the last before Formula 1’s four-week summer recess, and will conclude a run of five Grands Prix in just six weeks.

The early rounds of 2024 broadly replicated the tedium of 2023 but the championship has since exploded into life, with seven different race winners, including four in the last four races.

World Champion Max Verstappen is still atop the pile, with a 76-point title advantage over Lando Norris, and seven wins, but none of those have come in the last three events. The three-race winless stretch is his longest drought since 2021.

This week, Verstappen faces an even greater uphill climb than usual.

For the third straight year, Verstappen will take a fresh engine at Spa-Francorchamps, incurring an expected 10-place grid penalty. A terminal failure with a new engine in Canada last month left him out of sync in terms of his four allowed power units for 2024, and he will take a fifth this weekend.

A couple of clashes with opponents—Lando Norris in Austria, Lewis Hamilton in Hungary—a lack of performance, and race strategies that he has queried have all served frustrate the always blunt Verstappen, who very publicly threw his team under the bus last Sunday in Hungary.

Red Bull introduced upgrades to its RB20 in Hungary but it remained second best to McLaren, while Verstappen struggled to find the right balance. Red Bull is hoping that further performance will be unearthed from the upgrades as time advances, and this weekend’s round at the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps acts as an acid test of their predicament.

Spa-Francorchamps has been a happy hunting ground for Verstappen and Red Bull across the past two seasons, with both the RB18 and RB19 machines flying around the circuit which is spread across seven kilometers of the Ardennes Forest.

It is a circuit where a compromise is required, due to the largely full throttle blasts of the first and third sectors counterbalanced by the lengthy corner-laden middle sector of the lap—and in 2022 and 2023 Red Bull was in a different zip code to its rivals.

Verstappen has been down this path before at Spa.

In 2022, Verstappen won from 14th on the grid at Spa, and last year won from sixth, with victory margins of 17 and 22 seconds respectively, having elected on both occasions to undertake an engine change. In both years, Sergio Perez finished runner-up to complete a Red Bull 1-2.

Red Bull knew then that Verstappen would face a sanction at some stage and has strategically taken the setback at Spa-Francorchamps, a circuit where overtaking is possible, and where mother nature can also intervene to spice up proceedings.

“We have to be open minded and try to make the best of it,” Verstappen said. “That’s what we’ll try to do. At the moment, I also don’t know how competitive we’re going to be here. Also a few places there’s new tarmac, so we need to see how the tires respond to that as well. So still a lot of unknowns. Obviously with the weather, quite a bit of rain expected on Friday and Saturday. So yeah, just need to follow the weather and just progression through the weekend, and see how competitive we are.”

Verstappen’s teammate Perez remains under scrutiny after a miserable run that has seen him slip to seventh in the championship, and left Red Bull vulnerable to a resurgent McLaren in the Constructors’ Championship, with the gap only 51 points.

Red Bull will be aiming to replicate the 1-2 finishes of 2022 and 2023, while Perez dearly needs a strong error-free display in the final race prior to the summer break, during which Red Bull is set to assess his future.

McLaren is the team in form, having shown strong performance across the recent sequence of events, prior to finally converting its speed into a 1-2 finish in Hungary.

“I have no idea,” Norris said on the notion of McLaren being favorites. “Based on where we were last weekend, yes, but I think last weekend was the first one where I can say we were easily the best team in both qualifying and the race. Spa is completely different, much lower downforce, and this is where Red Bull have been incredible in the past.”

For Mercedes Spa-Francorchamps is another test of its recent progress, while Ferrari has an opportunity to assess its SF-24 on a high-speed track amid its struggles since introducing an update package in Spain last month.

“It’s clear McLaren and Red Bull, when they switch it on, have three or four tenths on us,” Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz, said.

In the five rounds since its victory in Monaco Ferrari has not contended for another win, and has scored only one podium finish, slipping behind McLaren in the standings.

“Spa will allow us to verify if we have done a good job over the past few weeks to mitigate the side effects in high speed corners of the update package we introduced recently,” Ferrari Team Principal, Frederic Vasseur, said. “The porpoising effect was very low at the Hungaroring, thanks to the evolution of the floor we introduced in Budapest and now we will see if we have fixed it at high speed tracks too.”