After a month off, we are finally back to racing! It was a highly anticipated weekend at Spa, but due to unrelenting rain, the weekend was a bit of a bummer.

The weekend was very wet and almost all sessions contained rain. However, when it came time to hold the race, the rain was too hard and the track was too wet. The race kept getting delayed and delayed until finally, after racing two laps behind the safety car, the race was officially considered done.

The two laps served meant that it qualified as a race, but as the laps were behind the safety car, everyone finished the race where they had started. Well, everyone except Sergio Perez who crashed on the way to line up on the grid. That also means that since George Russell started on the front row he officially has a podium to his name!! I am so glad for him and I think he really deserves it. Since there wasn’t much racing, points awarded were halved.

Max Verstappen qualified on pole, and therefore he won the race. He was joined on the podium by George Russell in second and Lewis Hamilton in third. Daniel Ricciardo finished fourth followed by Sebastian Vettel in fifth, Pierre Gasly in sixth, Esteban Ocon in seventh, Charles Leclerc in eighth, Nicholas Latifi in ninth, and Carlos Sainz rounded out the top ten.

While I was disappointed to not really see any racing, I understand why they chose to not send the drivers out. It would have been too dangerous. We saw an example of this in qualifying when Lando Norris crashed hard into the barriers at Eau Rouge. He was looking set to start on the front row until he crashed and briefly red flagged the session. He was taken to the hospital for precautionary checks, but he was given the all clear to race on the Sunday.

So instead of focusing on the lack of racing this weekend, I thought I would touch a little bit on racing in the rain.

Rain has long been the enemy of motorsport. When the Championship first started back in the 50s, there were no fancy radars to predict the weather, and drivers raced in some unthinkable conditions. In modern motorsport, teams invest thousands in the most high tech radars to have the best weather predictions from which to plan their strategies.

It’s said that rain is the great equalizer in this sport, because it no longer matters who has the best car, but who has the skills. This latest weekend is a great example of that as we saw George Russell almost outqualify everyone in a Williams that is not front of the grid level.

Rain brings both good and bad. Some drivers have really proven themselves in the rain. Some of the best drives in the rain in my opinion are Max Verstappen in Brazil 2016, James Hunt in Japan 1976, and Lewis Hamilton at the 2008 British Grand Prix. All of these moments are times when drivers showed they had what it takes to be the best of the best.

However, the rain can also bring tragedy, and nothing is a more prominent example of this than the 2014 Japanese Grand Prix. The conditions were extremely wet, and the lap after the Sauber of Adrian Sutil had crashed, Jules Bianchi ran off the track and into the tractor crane sustaining serious head injuries and brain damage. He passed away on July 17th 2015. He was the first person to die of injuries sustained in the sport since Ayrton Senna in 1994.

I think that all fans hope for a little bit of rain every once in a while. It can make racing more exciting and bring about some unexpected results. However, I think there is fine line between being able to race and too much rain. This weekend was too much. As much as it sucked to not see a race this past weekend, we are back to racing this coming weekend in the Netherlands for Verstappen’s home race! I can’t wait as it will be my first time watching racing at this track. Hopefully this weekend it will be lights out and away we go.