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While most of the attention is focused on the fight at the front, one of the season's closest battles is unfolding in the midfield.

After 10 race weekends and 14 starts, Racing Bulls and Alpine are tied on 61 points in the Constructors' Championship, making them the most evenly matched teams on the grid.

Spa perfectly illustrated just how close they are. Franco Colapinto produced one of the overtakes of the race, passing both Liam Lawson and teammate Pierre Gasly in a single move as the two rivals continued to trade positions throughout the weekend.

What's particularly interesting is how differently the two teams have reached the same result.

Racing Bulls have steadily moved forward thanks to a series of aerodynamic upgrades, while Alpine's progress has been helped by its first season using Mercedes power units.

With both teams continuing to develop and only a handful of points separating their drivers, this rivalry could remain one of the highlights of the second half of the season.

Different cars, different power units, different drivers, identical championship totals. That's how close Formula 1's midfield has become.

One of the biggest talking points after Spa wasn't the racing itself. It was how much control drivers have lost over their own cars.

Under the 2026 regulations, battery deployment is no longer something drivers can manage freely. Instead, sophisticated control software decides when electrical energy is harvested and released throughout the lap.

George Russell's race highlighted the problem. An unexpected deployment issue left him with almost no electrical power on the Kemmel Straight, turning a fight at the front into a battle with Lewis Hamilton that ended in retirement.

He wasn't the only frustrated driver. Max Verstappen described the new systems as "a jungle", while Oscar Piastri criticised qualifying being influenced by software behaviour rather than outright performance. Charles Leclerc admitted that even drivers sometimes struggle to understand why they suddenly gain or lose straight-line speed.

Perhaps the most revealing comment came from Kimi Antonelli. He explained that changing your driving style on energy-demanding circuits can confuse the deployment system, producing behaviour that even the drivers don't fully expect.

That highlights one of Formula 1's biggest technical shifts. Engineers are no longer chasing only horsepower or aerodynamic downforce. They're writing software that decides when hundreds of horsepower become available.

The fastest car in 2026 may be the one with the smartest predictive algorithms!

George Russell's lack of straight-line speed has fuelled plenty of speculation in recent weeks.

At first, Mercedes believed the problem was linked to Russell's driving style. After Silverstone, the team thought it had found a solution. Spa proved otherwise. Even after further changes, Russell continued to suffer from inconsistent energy deployment while teammate Kimi Antonelli dominated the weekend. It's easy to jump to conspiracy theories and suggest Mercedes is favouring Antonelli. The available evidence doesn't support that.

A similar pattern has appeared at McLaren, where Lando Norris has often enjoyed stronger straight-line speed than Oscar Piastri despite the two drivers having remarkably similar driving styles.

The more likely explanation lies in the complexity of Formula 1's new power units. Battery deployment is now controlled by sophisticated predictive software that constantly reacts to hundreds of inputs, from braking and throttle application to energy state and lap position.

That means two cars with identical hardware can behave differently simply because tiny differences in how a lap unfolds change the way the system manages electrical energy.

The challenge for engineers is no longer just building a faster power unit. It's making sure the software delivers the right amount of energy at exactly the right moment, every lap.

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