The second half of the 2025 season gets underway at Spa-Francorchamps which hosts the Belgian Grand Prix where drivers will need to get around an exciting tyre selection.

After a two-week break, the F1 field will today return to action at Spa-Francorchamps, with the Belgian Grand Prix featuring a sprint weekend format.

After the races in Shanghai and Miami, this will be the third weekend of the year run to the Sprint format: just one free practice session on Friday, after which it’s Sprint Qualifying, with the Sprint race itself run over 15 laps on Saturday, following by qualifying.

The usual 44 laps of the Belgian Grand Prix proper take place on Sunday. It’s the second time this circuit has hosted a Sprint, following on from the one in 2023.

Jump in the tyre allocation

For this event, Pirelli has chosen three dry weather compounds that are not consecutive: the Hard is the hardest in the 2025 range, the C1, but then there’s a jump to the Medium (C3) and the Soft (C4). That has not happened since the 2022 Australian Grand Prix, when the trio consisted of the C2 as Hard, the C3 as Medium and the C5 as Soft.

The new compound here is the Hard, as the Medium (C3) and Soft (C4) are the same as last year. Pirelli expects that this exciting tyre selection will lead to a two-stop strategy, "adding a greater degree of uncertainty to tyre management over the course of the weekend, especially as it is a Sprint event, with just one hour of free practice and a different dry tyre allocation."

With this format, the regulations stipulate one fewer set of tyres than on a normal weekend: each driver has 12 sets, six of Soft, four of Medium and two of Hard. Furthermore, the Medium is the only tyre permitted for the first two parts of Sprint Qualifying and the Soft must be used in the third.

However, with the circuit nestling in the forest of the Ardennes hills, it is famous for its changeable weather, even from one part of the track to another and even in the height of summer. Therefore, it’s not out of the question that both types of wet weather tyre, the Intermediate and Extreme Wet, could come into play over the weekend.

As for last season, the vast majority of drivers lined up on the grid on the Medium. The exceptions were Carlos Sainz and Zhou Guanyu who went for the Hard and Daniel Ricciardo who opted for the Soft.

The two-stop proved to be the preferred choice with the Hard compound working best in terms of degradation and performance. Of the 19 drivers who finished the race, Zhou being the only retirement, just five of them, Russell, Alonso, Stroll, Magnussen and Tsunoda, who took the chequered flag in that order, pitted only the once to switch from Medium to Hard.

Russell won and Alonso finished ninth, the only two of this group to score points. However, following post-race FIA scrutineering, Russell was disqualified as his car was under the minimum regulation weight, which handed the win to team-mate Lewis Hamilton, who had gone for a Medium-Hard-Hard strategy.