Belgian GP: Difficult Wet Qualifying at Spa

Lewis and George started Q2 on the used Inters on which they had finished Q1. The track continued to dry as the session progressed, particularly in the middle sector, while the newly resurfaced sectors one and three took longer to dry.

At the halfway point of the session, our duo collected fresh Intermediates from the pits and went straight back out onto the track. The track got faster and faster in the final minutes of Q2, which Lewis and George were able to capitalise on with P2 and P3 respectively, thus safely advancing to Q3 but the risk of rain for Q3 increased again.

That's why our Mercedes duo lined up at the head of the queue to leave the pit lane at the start of Q3 so that they could get out on track as quickly as possible before potential rain arrived.

On their first push lap, Lewis and George were P1 and P3, but were subsequently pushed back by the two Red Bulls. On their second push lap, both drivers improved their times but remained unchanged in P3 and P6, with the two McLarens splitting our duo.

On the final run, Charles Leclerc moved up to P2 between Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez on fresh Intermediates. As a result, Lewis and George slipped back to P4 and P7, but Verstappen's 10-place grid penalty moved them up one place again.

This means that George and Lewis will start the last race before the summer break from P3 and P6 respectively. The start of the Belgian Grand Prix is at 15:00 local time (14:00 BST).

George Russell

Predicting the ever-changing weather made qualifying a real challenge today. You had to make sure you had the new Intermediate tyre on your car at the right time, and that was difficult to do. We were maybe slightly too early putting it on in Q3, but it is easy to say that with the benefit of hindsight. Starting P6 for tomorrow is therefore a fair result.

There will be a lot of unknowns going into tomorrow. The forecast is currently dry, and we will be hoping to move forward from P6. The McLarens looked fast on Friday and may be slightly quicker than us, but let’s wait and see. Tyre degradation will also play a big factor. It was some of the highest levels we have seen so far this year in FP1 and FP2. Today’s rain may also have an impact on the surface so we will have to be adaptable.

Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director

We weren't happy with the balance or pace of the car yesterday, so we made some fairly major changes to the mechanical and aero specification of the car overnight. We'd hoped for a dry window in FP3 to evaluate those, but unfortunately it stayed wet throughout and there was no chance to accumulate any meaningful running.

Wet qualifying sessions are difficult at present as the grid is tight. You need to time your new sets to coincide with when the track is at its quickest. By Q3, we were down to one new set of Intermediates. We'd decided to carry more fuel and do multiple laps to try and land one with the driest conditions. That was similar to McLaren. We lost out to the Ferrari of Leclerc though who used his new set right at the end. Had we not been carrying the fuel, we would have had the pace for P2.

We don’t know where we will stack up on race pace, as the car is quite different to the one we ran in the dry yesterday. Starting from P3 and P6 though, we are hopefully well placed to fight for a podium.