McLaren driver Oscar Piastri of Australia, left, steers his car ahead of McLaren driver Lando Norris of Britain during the Formula One Grand Prix at the Spa-Francorchamps racetrack in Spa, Belgium, Sunday, July 27, 2025. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert)

The pace of the Formula 1 (F1) weekend at the historic Spa-Francorchamps circuit in Belgium was frenetic as it was the third of six sprint weekends. Instead of three practice sessions, qualifying, and then the race which is the normal F1 schedule, sprint weekends have only one practice session, then sprint qualifying, the sprint race, the feature race qualifying, and then the feature race.

Sprint races provide less points with the winner getting eight points down to eighth place earning one point. Feature races provide 25 points to the winner, then 18, 15, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2, and 1 point for the drivers in second through tenth. The reason for the point difference is that the sprint race is far fewer laps than the feature race. For instance, at the Spa circuit, the sprint race was 15 laps while the feature race had 44 laps. One third the distance for one third the points, roughly.

Every point, however, is critical to the drivers who want to improve in the standings. Going into the Belgium race weekend, the difference between Oscar Piastri, leading the driver’s points, and Lando Norris in second place was a mere eight points.

Teams are also eager for their drivers to score points as the money allocated to each team for the next season is directly related to how they placed in the previous season. There are complicated mechanics at work in how they divvy up the money, but the basics idea is that the better a team does, the more money they will get.

Last season, Alpine scored 35 of their 65 points in one stellar(ly lucky) race result in Brazil which launched them from 8th to 6th position. In terms of prize money, they received about 17 million more dollars because of that result.

So, that’s what keeps teams engaged in sprint races. Racing drivers like racing most of all, so they’re generally amicable to this format. Max Verstappen seems to love them as he has won 12 of the 21 to date. Fans enjoy the added spectacle over a weekend, and the venues love seeing more people in the seats (as practice sessions are notoriously under-attended compared to race days).

What about the viewer at home? Those who watch F1 as avidly as I do, watching every session throughout every race weekend, the six sprint race weekends liven things up a little, and sometimes you get a sprint race that is a microcosm, something completely different than what you’ll see in the feature race.

The 2025 Chinese Grand Prix is a great example with a win from Lewis Hamilton in his new Ferrari that was so wildly different than any other race performance he’s had in all thirteen feature races. In Belgium, the result of the sprint race wasn’t as interesting to me as how it was used as a learning experience.

Piastri drove his McLaren masterfully around the Spa circuit, one of his favorites on the calendar. He topped the practice session by four tenths of a second, and claimed the sprint pole by nearly five tenths, a large margin for the close racing we’ve seen throughout 2025.

In the sprint race, however, Verstappen started his Red Bull in second place and had a great run on Piastri part way through the first lap. Using the slipstream from the car in front as well as his lower downforce package increasing his straight-line speed, Verstappen passed Piastri for the lead and never relinquished it.

Piastri didn’t make things easy for Verstappen, staying within seven tenths of Verstappen throughout all 15 laps of the sprint race.

“Basically, you’re keeping faster cars behind, so you have to drive over the limit of what you think is possible,” said Verstappen after the race. “I’m just doing 15 qualifying laps to keep them behind on a track where tire management is important.”

When the feature race qualifying started a few hours after the end of the sprint race, Piastri was the favorite once again given his one lap dominance so far over the weekend. Verstappen couldn’t replicate his second place, managing only fourth, three thousandths of a second behind Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc. At the front, Norris, Piastri’s teammate at McLaren, put in a great lap and had provisional pole.

Piastri tried responding, but ended up fizzling out at the end of his lap and ended up in second place, eight-five thousandths of a second behind his teammate. I couldn’t help but wonder if Verstappen’s pass influenced Piastri, convincing him to not get on pole, but try to replicate the maneuver in the race.

When the feature race time came, rain was pouring down throughout the Spa-Francorchamps circuit. After one lap behind the safety car, race control red flagged the race and ground everything to a halt. Drivers got out of their cars and into the dry while fans sat patiently waiting.

An hour and a half later, the pace car finally took the cars around the track once again with race control deciding things were looking better. The call was excessively safety conscious since the track was quite dried out at this point, but at least it allowed for the possibility of a standing start on the grid instead of a rolling start behind the safety car.

Opting once again for safety, a rolling start was called for after three laps behind the safety car. Now a 41-lap race, Norris led the field of cars across the start/finish line and things were underway.

Piastri kept his foot on the gas, tucked his car right behind his teammates, and managed to pull out and around Norris for the lead in the exact same place Verstappen got Piastri one day earlier. Second place was indeed the best place to start in Belgium.

Still, the race was far from decided. Though the two McLarens pulled away from the rest of the cars, Norris kept Piastri within a couple of seconds reach. The drying track meant the drivers would have to come in for dry weather tires soon, which Lewis Hamilton did first at the end of lap 11. Three other drivers followed his lead, and they were all successful in staying on the track through the remaining damp spots the next lap, so Piastri came in for his tires at the end of lap 12.

Norris would’ve lost a good five seconds if he came into the pits on the same lap as Piastri as the team only has one place to service their cars, and Norris would’ve had to wait for Piastri to finish and leave before the crew could service him. At the end of lap 13, Norris came in and went for the hard tires, a different strategy than Piastri who opted for the medium tires.

Though tire manufacturer Pirelli claimed the hard tire would be at least a second per lap slower than the medium tires, Norris had an eight second gap to Piastri, and that never really changed. Perhaps that was explained by a slower pace from Piastri to manage his tires, but the difference never quite materialized.

Norris had everything to do from second though, needing to catch and pass his teammate on track to get a win. As has been the case many other times this season, Norris was his own worst enemy and had three unforced errors during his drive to catch Piastri, as opposed to Piastri’s clean race in the front.

Even without the errors from Norris, it was most likely too little, too late on his part as there was still a three-and-a-half second gap between the two at the end of the race. Piastri drove masterfully and earned his sixth win of the season.

The championship lead for Piastri extended out to sixteen points after Belgium. With 11 races still to go, Norris has plenty of chances to come back on his teammate, but no other driver is likely to challenge either McLaren man for the lead.

I’ll go back to my commentary from the first race of the season when Piastri spun at his home race, but managed to keep his car going and crawl back up to ninth place. It only scored him two points, but with such a small lead, every point is important. I said then that his performance in Australia was the drive of a champion, and he’s continued to put in that level of performance for the other twelve races, looking every bit like a very deserving champion.

In less than a week, the F1 cars take to the track again in Hungary with the feature race taking place on Sunday, Aug. 3, at 9 a.m. Eastern Time.