Red Bull turned two seconds a lap of pace advantage into a fifth-place drop by stopping three times when everyone else stopped twice.
Sergio Perez was nearly two seconds a lap faster than Lewis Hamilton on Sunday. Hamilton won the Belgian Grand Prix. Perez finished seventh.
The race was decided on lap 21. Red Bull pitted Perez for a second time, abandoning the two-stop that everyone else — Hamilton, Leclerc, Piastri, Verstappen — was running. The call was supposed to unlock an offset advantage: fresh hards against drivers on 10-lap-older tyres, with enough pace in hand to make up the pit stop delta.
The problem is that Perez never had the track position to use it. He came out in traffic, lost time fighting through the midfield, and by lap 42 Red Bull threw another set of softs on the car — a final admission that the strategy had collapsed. Hamilton, meanwhile, never pitted again after lap 26. He ran 33 consecutive laps on a single set of hard tyres and controlled the race from the front.
The degradation data tells you everything. Hamilton's hard tyres were improving as the stint went on — his lap times dropped 0.056 seconds per lap, meaning the tyre was coming to him, not falling away. Perez's hards, by contrast, were degrading at +0.032 seconds per lap in his second stint. Not catastrophic, but not good enough to justify staying out longer than the cars ahead.
So Red Bull pitted early — not because the tyres were gone, but because they thought they could out-strategise Mercedes with an extra stop. They couldn't. The tyre offset never turned into a laptime advantage large enough to pass cars on-track, and by the time Perez cleared traffic, the leaders were untouchable.
This is the part that should keep Red Bull up at night. Perez ran a 104.7-second lap on soft tyres at the end of the race — the fastest lap of the day. Hamilton's best was 106.7. That's a 1.9-second-per-lap advantage. Averaged across race stints, Perez was still 1.95 seconds faster. He had the pace to win this race, or at the very least finish on the podium.
Instead, he finished seventh — behind both Ferraris, behind his own teammate who started 11th, behind a McLaren that was a second slower on raw pace. Red Bull turned a car capable of winning into a car that lost five places, purely because they stopped one more time than they needed to.
The three-stop works if you have clean air and a tyre advantage wide enough to overtake on-track. Red Bull had neither. Perez spent laps 22–30 stuck behind Sainz, Norris, and Alonso — drivers on older tyres who he should have been breezing past. By the time he cleared them, Hamilton was gone.
At the Dutch Grand Prix, Red Bull will need to decide whether they trust their car to run the same strategy as everyone else. At Spa, they had the fastest car on the grid and tried to be clever. It cost them a podium — maybe a win.