The Driver's Eye: Belgium

Belgium's Spa-Francorchamps circuit is rightly considered to be one of motor-sport's finest circuits. Here's Sky Sports F1's Anthony Davidson to explain why Spa is one of the most difficult challenges in the sport.

I'll be making my full return to Sky Sports F1 live race weekend coverage at Spa and what a track for me to come back for. It's certainly one of the circuits that makes me wish I was still driving in F1. Spa's a track that most drivers like and would rank as one of their favourites, if not their most favourite. The reason for that is because it's got a lot of character, it's fast and flowing. It's just got a bit of everything really from tight corners to high-speed corners and chicanes as it runs through the Ardennes forest. It's true to say that the track has been slightly sanitised over the years with extra run-off areas, namely at Pouhon, Rivage, Blanchimont and the Bus Stop chicane, but despite that it's still a challenging circuit in a sense that it's very technical. You really have to think your way around it. Take the sequence of corners at the top of the hill at Les Combes through to Malmedy - one corner leads into another and it really makes you think about where you should carry the speed and where you should sacrifice the speed. Is Spa the ultimate challenge for an F1 driver? No, I wouldn't say it's the ultimate challenge in terms of putting the car on the line and taking risks. But because it's such a long lap the skill in getting a single lap, a complete lap, perfect makes the challenge pretty difficult. And it's one of those tracks that even though you might feel you have mastered it, you'll still come away from it thinking what you might have done to be faster. It's a very subtle process to building up your lap time around there. It's not a frightening or daunting track to drive, say, like Monaco is for the first ever time. I wouldn't say it's anywhere as hard-core as a track like that, but it's definitely a thinker's circuit. It's also a circuit that boasts some of the most famous corners in motorsport. Eau Rouge has, for decades, traditionally been Spa's calling card but these days it isn't quite the corner it used to be because contemporary F1 cars have pretty much outgrown it. My second F1 race came at Spa with Minardi in 2002 and that was probably one of the last ever Formula 1 cars that couldn't quite take Eau Rouge flat! Since then every car has developed and they've been able to go full throttle there - even my Super Aguri was comfortably flat out through Eau Rouge. Now one of the best corners on the track for me is Pouhon. It's taken normally in sixth gear, a dab on the brakes, feed the car into the corner, hang on in there as the car sort of squirms around for a bit - all at about 170mph. I would say it is the corner on the track now that pushes the cars to their absolute limits and the one that really highlights the good and the bad cars out there. The corner becomes even more of a test in the wet - and there's always a chance of that happening at some point of the race weekend. It always starts raining at one point of the track first it seems. Normally it's at the top of the hill at Malmedy - the highest point of the circuit - but it can sweep in from anywhere. I've been in Spa before for a 24-hour kart race and saw a car drive down from the hills with snow on the roof - and it was sunny where we were at the track! So it's that type of place and it's the typical type of track where you're going to get four seasons in one day and you've got to be prepared for that, as a fan, a team member and driver. In terms of overtaking, it's not a track that presents lots of passing opportunities - especially through sector two - but the Kemmel Straight is the most obvious place to get the job done. It all starts at La Source and if you can get in the slipstream of the car in front through Eau Rouge and up the Kemmel Straight and have the opportunity to use DRS at the same time then the likelihood is you're going to make an overtaking move into Les Combes. The DRS effect is very powerful around here due to the nature of the long straights and maybe it was slightly overdone last year. As well as the Kemmel Straight, you have the Bus Stop chicane at the end of the lap and even if you can't quite make a move stick here, you can still line someone up to finish the job off through La Source. The Bus Stop is one of several corners that have been chopped about over the years and I just hope that they don't continue to tamper with the track too much because they've definitely taken away some of the challenges that came with the Spa of old. But still, I've always enjoyed every car I've ever driven around Spa and it invariably supplies a great spectacle when F1 comes to town. AD Now check out Ant's corner-by-corner track guide of Spa.