It’s been quite a couple of weeks for Formula 1. First, its annual visit to one of the oldest tracks on the calendar, the Italian temple of speed that is Monza, just outside Milan. Apologies for no Ars report, but your correspondent was on the ground, on vacation, learning the hard way that attempts to call the circuit “accessible by public transport” can still involve walking several miles. The place was packed with Tifosi—the hardcore Italian superfans—dressed in red, who had their hopes dashed almost immediately as Charles Leclerc first ruined his teammate’s race, then his own, all within the first two laps.

Salvation came in the form of the first Italian title contender in my lifetime, Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli. Opting to take a new engine and other power unit components meant Antonelli would start the race from 19th. But the kid is in fine form right now, and Monza’s long straights and slow corners make for several good overtaking spots. I declared to my race companions that morning that “he’s going to podium, easily,” but if anything, I was too cautious. By the time Leclerc’s heavy crash at Parabolica had stopped the race, Antonelli was already up to 12th.

From the second standing start, on fresh medium tires and still needing a second pitstop, he made short work of the rest of the grid, including his teammate George Russell, who spent much of the race in the lead, on a theoretically faster one-stop strategy. Even a mistake from Antonelli that saw him make an excursion through a gravel trap as he tried to pass Russell couldn’t stop his charge, and he became the first Italian to win the Italian Grand Prix in 60 years—fairy tale stuff, surely.

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After months of rumors surrounding his future, now we know: Four-time champion Max Verstappen is staying in the sport for the foreseeable future. The news broke on the eve of the Dutch Grand Prix, held this past weekend at Zandvoort in the Netherlands as F1 returned from its mandatory summer vacation.

Verstappen's wasn't the only contract news—Williams will keep both Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz, too. More than once I've noticed a driver having an underwhelming weekend following a freshly signed contract; in this case, all three had a weekend they'd probably rather forget. They weren't the only ones, though. Up and down the grid, we saw friction between teammates. And there's no one an F1 driver wants to beat more than the only other person to have the same car as they do.

Formula 1 returned from its summer break with this weekend's Dutch Grand Prix.

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Formula 1 returned to the Spa-Francorchamps circuit for the Belgium Grand Prix this weekend. This ribbon of tarmac in the Ardennes is one of the sport's historic venues, featuring in the first F1 season way back in 1950. But as yesterday's race showed, the current F1 machinery is utterly ill-suited to this dramatic venue.

As we saw at Suzuka in Japan earlier this year, a 2026 F1 battery is able to power the race car's electric motor for only a few seconds a lap; for much of the rest of the lap, the energy-starved cars have less power going to their rear wheels than in the junior F2 feeder series.

The best race track in the world

For many, including much of the current F1 grid, Spa is considered perhaps the planet's greatest race track. In fact, both Spa and the Belgian Grand Prix predate the F1 world championship, with its first race held in 1922. Back then, the circuit was a 9-mile loop of public roads, taking in the towns of Malmedy and Stavelot before returning to Francorchamps. In the postwar years, the layout shrank slightly to 8.7 miles (14.1 km) and was ferociously fast, with average lap speeds of up to 150 mph (240 km/h)—and ferociously dangerous, given cars with huge amounts of power and minimal concessions to safety.

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Formula 1 raced at the Red Bull Ring in Austria this past weekend while the region sweltered under a heat dome. It was a weekend of unmet expectations: After such a strong performance in Barcelona, pundits were ready to declare Ferrari's Lewis Hamilton a proper title contender. The red cars flattered to deceive at times, but the real challenge to Mercedes' ongoing dominance came from a newly resurgent Red Bull and Max Verstappen, who reminded us why so many of the packed grandstands were all wearing orange.

The original Östereichring was a spectacular thing, with steep gradients, long straights, and high-speed curves, surrounded by views of the Styrian mountains. But racetrack designers in the late 1960s paid scant attention to safety features, and the corners were mostly lined with Armco fencing. The sport stopped racing there after the 1987 Grand Prix, judging it too dangerous for the speeds F1 cars were capable of at the time. It was rebuilt in the mid-'90s, losing around a mile (1.6 km) in length and much of its original character in the process but gaining things like gravel traps and runoff areas at the corners, making the place a whole lot safer.

The Red Bull Ring looks dramatic, but click the YouTube link in the second paragraph (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxUXpnGI648">or here</a>) to see in-car footage of the old track from 1987. Credit: Robert Szaniszlo/NurPhoto via Getty Images

F1 returned to the newly christened A1-Ring from 1997 to 2003, then left for pastures new. Red Bull's co-founder, Dietrich Mateschitz, bought it the following year—the same year he bought the Jaguar F1 team from Ford and renamed it Red Bull Racing. Mateschitz and Red Bull renovated the track again, bringing the facilities up to 21st-century F1 standards, and the sport returned in 2014. It's not the shortest lap on the calendar in terms of distance—that honor goes to Monaco—but it does have the shortest lap times: Valtteri Bottas set a time of 1 minute, 2.939 seconds in qualifying for the 2020 Austrian Grand Prix.

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