With reigning world champ and Mercedes teammate Lewis Hamilton starting from the back of the grid due to engine penalties the race in Belgium was always going end one way – with Rosberg standing on top of the podium spraying his team and rivals with the bubbly stuff.
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The 2016 championship leader was already condemned to start from the back of the grid after picking up a 15-place penalty in Friday morning’s first practice and a further 15 spots following another component change in the afternoon. Having preserved all his rubber by sitting out of qualifying, Hamilton will be able to exploit the extra grip in the race.
The intention was to keep Hamilton’s engine in good shape for the rest of the season.
He will be joined there by McLaren’s Fernando Alonso, who so far has a total of 35 grid places in terms of engine penalties and may yet be hit with more.
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Elsewhere, Sebastian Vettel qualified fourth for Ferrari with Daniel Ricciardo lining up in fifth for Red Bull.
Defending champion Hamilton now leads Rosberg by only nine points in another tight battle between the Mercedes duo, the Englishman minimising the damage by charging successfully through the field.
The race promises to be enlivened by divergent tyre strategies, with Rosberg, the Ferraris and Ricciardo starting the race on the soft tyre and Verstappen on the super-soft, which is proving very fragile and runs out of grip after just a few laps. I’m happy to have won the race, it’s been a great weekend for me and that’s it.
Over the course of the weekend Mercedes has fitted an updated power unit to Hamilton’s auto ahead of each practice session, creating a pool of new components to be used over the remaining nine races of the season.
“But in general, I had everything under control because I just had an awesome auto out there, and Lewis wasn’t there to battle it out, which made it a less-difficult weekend”.
Verstappen was only just over a tenth of a second adrift of Rosberg as he became the youngest driver in the history of Formula 1 to start on the front row of the grid.
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“I was trying to keep my head down all weekend and focus on the long-run paces”. We did great selecting the right tires. Where previously teams would be fitting new engines nearly every day of running, the limit is now five per season before they face sanction. I want to get as high up as I can but I think it is going to be hard tomorrow. “To be so close to them, on a lap with some long straights, we can be very proud of that”.
