"Kimi can buy me dinner." Valtteri Bottas jokes about his part in Antonelli’s Belgian GP win

Charles Leclerc lost the lead of the race to Kimi Antonelli shortly after appearing to be held up while lapping the Cadillac

Negotiating traffic is a fact of life in Formula 1 racing, all the more so given the current pace differential between the front and back of the grid in a new regulatory era.

It was especially unfortunate for Charles Leclerc to be locked in a battle for the lead of the Belgian Grand Prix when he came up to lap one of the slowest cars on the grid – in a particularly awkward location on track.

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Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli had led the race from pole position, but lost out in the pitstop phase when the virtual safety car was deployed on lap 20 to enable marshals to clear debris from the track. Antonelli had pitted two laps earlier under green-flag conditions, leaving Leclerc in the lead.

Since the VSC requires all drivers on track to maintain a slower pace, Ferrari was able to bring Leclerc in for his pitstop while preserving his lead, with a two-second margin over Antonelli. After a handful of laps where that gap remained relatively static, the Mercedes driver began to attack the Ferrari.

On lap 33 they were separated by 0.9s when they bore down on the Cadillac of Valtteri Bottas, who had started 19th and was about to go a lap down. It was just bad luck for Leclerc that this happened between the sweeping Fagnes corners and the fast double-right at Campus/Stavelot.

By the time Bottas got out of the way, Antonelli was closing in and then gained a brief aerodynamic 'tow’ from the Cadillac towards Blanchimont, enabling him to get within half a second of Leclerc at the start of the next lap, where he slipstreamed past to retake the lead at Les Combes.

Bottas saw none of this since he pitted at the end of lap 33.

"They were closing so quick, so it really caught me out," he told media including Motorsport.com after the race.

"I don't know, did it make a difference? Did he [Leclerc] get passed after that?"

Informed that this was the case, he quipped, "Kimi can buy me a dinner…"

Antonelli beat Leclerc into second place

Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images

Had this been a genuine case of impeding, a stewards’ investigation would likely had followed but Bottas reacted to the blue flags within the tolerance allowed. As he explained, the Ferrari and Mercedes closed in very quickly: at the start of the lap, they had been in the region of five seconds behind, and ran through the first sector around a second faster than the Cadillac.

It was in the second sector, where the superior downforce of the more competitive cars told, that they ate up the gap at a spectacular rate. Bottas went through this area in 52.547s, Leclerc in 49.155s.

Leclerc then caught Bottas right at the entry to Campus/Stavelot, where there is only one practical racing line given the cornering speed and the presence of gravel off the line.

"I think today really highlights still the issues we have," said Bottas.

"It's still a bit of reliability, but also our tyre degradation is quite big, and here I think it's because of the high-speed corners, we just don't have to load in the high-speed, and that's when we slide and we kill the tyres.

"But, yeah, something still to work on, obviously."