Alex Jacques explains why Lewis Hamilton didn’t look like himself at the Belgian Grand Prix after Ferrari updates

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Lewis Hamilton salvaged a seventh place in the Belgian Grand Prix from what was fast becoming a troubled weekend for the Ferrari driver.

Formula 1 commentator Alex Jacques has spoken exclusively to F1 Oversteer about the Belgian GP, in which Hamilton suffered a tough weekend.

The seven-time world champion had to contend with two early exits in qualifying, leaving him starting near the back of the grid for both the Sprint race on Saturday and the main Grand Prix.

Ferrari changed some components in Hamilton’s power unit before the Grand Prix, which required him to start from the pit lane. The Belgian GP was then delayed by 80 minutes due to poor visibility caused by rain that had hit the track 30 minutes before the start.

Hamilton joined Max Verstappen in feeling the conditions were suitable to race in much earlier than FIA Race Control thought. Once the action got underway, the cars did 11 laps on Intermediates before switching to slick tyres, with Hamilton among the first to put them on and overtaking five drivers in the process.

The early call enabled Hamilton to emerge in seventh, where he remained for the next 33 laps despite dealing with a fuel issue, which caused Ferrari to tell him to lift and coast for most of the race.

Hamilton salvaged a result, but Jacques believes Ferrari made the weekend “very difficult” for the Briton with one decision.

Alex Jacques thinks Ferrari made things ‘very difficult’ for Lewis Hamilton in Belgium

Ferrari brought a brand-new rear suspension to both cars at Spa Francorchamps, but Hamilton was keen to downplay the updates in the Thursday Drivers’ Press Conference.

Jacques thinks Ferrari made life difficult for Hamilton because of the nature of the Sprint weekend format, which gives drivers less time to fine-tune their car setups.

“Ferrari brought a brand new suspension, it’s their final major update of the year. They’ve been talking about this, changing the behaviour of the car and what the driver is able to extract from it for months. This has been talked about in the Italian media. This has been a much-publicised update,” said Jacques.

“They ran it in Mugello in a filming day. That’s not representative running, that’s basically just a shakedown to make sure there’s no flaws in it.

“So, you bring that to Belgium, you have one hour of practice. You have one hour to calibrate everything, okay? That is far from ideal.

“You had other teams as well bringing updates, they got themselves in a similar position.

“There’s an argument for a Sprint weekend when you only get one hour of practice to not bring updates to the car unless you are 100% certain it’s going to move you forward. And you can’t really be 100% certain that an update is going to take your performance forward.

“So I think from Ferrari’s point of view, they would have loved Belgium to be three hours of practice, all the running, get the perfect set-up, get an understanding, try every variation of the run plan, make sure you’ve got the correlation from the factory to the racetrack, and they just didn’t have that.

“So, if Lewis Hamilton has a full Grand Prix weekend in Budapest, one of his greatest ever circuits where he’s won there so many times and has a similar performance, then Ferrari would be in a different mindset about it, but I think it’s the nature of having to rush the performance part onto the car with the format of the weekend meant that it wasn’t until Sunday that Hamilton looked like Hamilton.”

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Lewis Hamilton made one ‘inexcusable’ mistake in Belgian Grand Prix

Part of the reason why Hamilton was so far back in the race was down to his lap time being deleted at the end of the first part of qualifying.

Hamilton was initially through to Q2 after a late effort put Gabriel Bortoleto out, but the seven-time world champion would have the lap struck after being judged to have exceeded track limits.

The offence came at Raidillon, where it appeared Hamilton was all four wheels outside of the track.

Peter Windsor felt it was “inexcusable” by Hamilton because of what happened to Oscar Piastri, where the Australian also had a lap deleted in Sprint qualifying for the same thing.