For twenty minutes, nothing happened. The pit light turned green at 12:30 local time, the Ardennes sun shone down on a bone-dry Spa-Francorchamps, and not a single driver felt any urgency to use it. When the field finally stirred, the hour that followed delivered a little of everything: a rookie’s cameo at the top, a champion’s alarming slide, a Red Bull stalled in the pit lane — and, at the death, a crash that has thrown Ferrari’s Saturday into chaos.

The Benchmark and the Chasers

Once the tyres finally turned, Lewis Hamilton was the first of the leading runners to lay down a marker, his 1:47.436 on softs soon refined to a 1:46.789. Racing Bulls rookie Arvid Lindblad even enjoyed a brief spell at the summit before the heavyweights emerged. Then Mercedes, having deliberately waited for more representative conditions, unleashed Kimi Antonelli — and the session found its ceiling. A 1:45.990, eight tenths clear of the field at that moment, would remain unbeaten.

The Italian very nearly beat it himself. A second flying lap was aborted at La Source — “I didn’t get the gear in” — and a final attempt died in a big slide through the Les Combes chicane. No matter: Lando Norris’s late charge fell just over a tenth short, with Max Verstappen third within two tenths despite dipping a wheel in the gravel on the exit of Turn 9. George Russell completed the top four, four tenths behind his team-mate — respectable, but only after another morning of profound discomfort.

Russell’s first run had placed him 1.2 seconds adrift of Antonelli, six tenths of it surrendered in the opening sector alone, with the Briton again complaining over the radio of a lack of straight-line speed. A second attempt improved the first sector but gave time back elsewhere. The overnight software work appears to have halved the problem. Halved — not solved.

Hamilton’s Costly Final Lap

Fifth place was the least of Ferrari’s concerns. On his final lap, Hamilton lost the rear of his car through the left-hander at Turn 13 — Fagnes, the very same corner where Gasly’s Alpine had met the barriers on Friday evening — sliding through the gravel and glancing the barrier before pulling his damaged Ferrari to a stop further down the road. The driver walked away; the car did not. Ferrari now faces a race against time to have it repaired for qualifying at 16:00 local time.

Two heavy accidents in two days at the same corner is no longer coincidence — it is a pattern, and on this evidence, the 2026 cars’ spiky low-downforce behaviour in Spa’s fast changes of direction is writing it. Ferrari will study Gasly’s data as much as Hamilton’s.

“Nothing is ready, everything is too cold.”

— Isack Hadjar, Red Bull, after a near-miss with Lance Stroll

A Chaotic Hour Behind the Top Four

Hadjar’s own morning veered between farce and fright. First his Red Bull rolled to a stop in the pit lane exit and had to be recovered to the garage; then, back on track, he locked up on an out lap and very nearly collected Lance Stroll’s Aston Martin into Turn 8, aborting his next attempt with the radio verdict above. Tenth place — with a back-of-the-grid start already guaranteed by power unit penalties — at least spared him further drama.

• Audi’s double top-ten: Nico Hülkenberg and Gabriel Bortoleto eighth and ninth, the midfield’s most convincing Saturday showing.
• Charles Leclerc, P6, and Oscar Piastri, P7: anonymous mornings by their standards — though Piastri, at least, finally banked a clean, full session after Friday’s hydraulic gremlins.
• Aston Martin, P21–P22: the nadir continues, now compounded by confirmation that Fernando Alonso has joined Norris, Hadjar and Stroll in collecting a grid penalty.
• Carlos Sainz, P18: a difficult hour made worse by a post-session investigation for a yellow-flag infringement.

What It Sets Up

Final practice rarely settles arguments, but it does frame them — and this one framed three. Antonelli, with the fastest lap of Friday evening and now Saturday morning, holds the high ground heading into qualifying, defending a 25-point championship lead with growing authority. Ferrari, quick all weekend, must first rebuild a car before it can fight for pole. And behind them, a grid scrambled by four separate penalties promises a Sunday in which the fastest drivers may start from everywhere.

Qualifying begins at 16:00 local time. The crash repairs, the deployment maps, the penalties — everything converges now.