Qualifying data contradicts Lewis Hamilton's claim of Red Bull losing its DRS advantage in the last few races

Lewis Hamilton's claim that Red Bull had lost their DRS advantage in recent times was proven wrong by the data around the effectiveness of the DRS during the Friday Qualifying session of the Belgian GP. Red Bull emerged as the leader.

Red Bull and Max Verstappen once again proved their dominance over the rest of the grid as he qualified P1 on track in the Friday qualifying session for the main race.

Although he will start in P6 because of a gearbox penalty, Verstappen dominated the field as he qualified 0.820 seconds ahead of Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc.

The data showed that Red Bull's DRS efficiency was 9.89 percent while the other teams had theirs closer to 9 percent. Mercedes ironically had the least efficient DRS at Spa with 7.66 percent.

After getting pole position at the 2023 Hungarian Grand Prix qualifying last weekend, Lewis Hamilton had said:

“Honestly, I think they’ve slowed down quite a bit from the beginning of the year. I mean, they’ve still got the DRS, they don’t have the DRS advantage all of a sudden that they used to have. Where did that go?

“But I mean, they’ve just had an upgrade, so we expected them to have taken another step. We heard it was around two-tenths or something like that. So for them to not have been able to extract that in qualifying is interesting.”

Lewis Hamilton praises Max Verstappen on his excellent qualifying lap in Spa

The seven-time world champion was quick to congratulate his rival Max Verstappen on his sensational pole lap. As per F1.com, Lewis Hamilton said:

"At the end, we were a good chunk off Max and his lap was pretty impressive. We’re pleased with where we are starting though. I’ll now have Max behind me on Sunday, but the aim is definitely to fight for a podium and chase down the guys ahead. No one got any real running in FP1, so I’m hoping that we have a decent long-run pace.

"Setting the car up ahead of qualifying was a bit of a guessing game. The car felt pretty decent, but we lost a lot of time in the middle sector. We’ll go away, study it, and see where there is time to be found. We will work on making any improvements we can, and we’ll be giving it everything we’ve got for the rest of the weekend. So far, though, it’s a good start."

It will be interesting to see if Lewis Hamilton gets his elbows out whilst defending from Verstappen during the opening stages of the race on Sunday.