Title rivals Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc will start the Belgian Grand Prix from the back of the grid.
The Red Bull and Ferrari stars are two of six drivers to be penalised for using too many engine parts, with McLaren’s Lando Norris another.
Verstappen, who leads Leclerc by 80 points in the championship, set the pace in Friday practice, an eye-opening 0.862secs quicker than Leclerc.
Norris was third, with Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton in sixth.
Lance Stroll’s Aston Martin, normally outside the top 10, was a surprise fourth ahead of Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari. Fernando Alonso’s Alpine, Mercedes’ George Russell, Daniel Ricciardo’s McLaren and Sergio Perez’s Red Bull completed the top 10.
The other drivers with engine penalties are Alfa Romeo’s Valtteri Bottas, Alpine’s Esteban Ocon and Haas’ Mick Schumacher.
What did the drivers say?
Verstappen’s pace looked hugely impressive and Leclerc certainly seemed to think it was an imposing time. When informed of it by his engineer, Leclerc said: “Oh. 45.5 is quick.”
After the session, Verstappen said: “We just looked at how we could set up the car in the best possible way and as soon as we went out the car was working pretty well.
“There are always little things you have to fine-tune with balance but basically from the first run I was happy with the car. So far it has been a good start.”
Sainz said: “I was comfortable and happy with the car. The end result is not looking very competitive but I was very happy with the car in P1.
“We did some changes in P2 that we know they might have not gone in the right direction but if you give me back the car of P1 we can be on the pace.
“It is true that Verstappen looked very quick today in P2 with the new soft. In the long run we were closer but he seems to be on it this weekend and we are going to need to extract the maximum out of it.”
Leclerc said: “Overall it wasn’t too bad a day. We tested quite a lot of things, I think everybody was on quite a different programme so difficult to compare on this first day back from the holidays. Low-fuel pace seems to be poor but high fuel seems to be quite OK. So we will try to come back stronger tomorrow.”
Both Mercedes drivers were struggling. Hamilton was 1.386secs slower than Verstappen and Russell 0.149secs further back.
Hamilton said: “We are just not very quick and I don’t know why. We are going out and giving it everything we’ve got: it could be tyres, tyre temps, wing level… could be a multitude of things. It doesn’t feel disastrous out there, it’s just we are just a long way off. But we often find this on Friday and then things change a little bit on Saturday. I hope that’s the case.”
Mercedes’ main problem was that the cars were lacking tyre temperature.
Russell, who was on pole at the last race in Hungary, said: “It’s something we’ve struggled with quite a lot this year, to get the temperature into the tyres and I struggled with it quite a lot today on every compound,” he said.
“In these conditions it’s definitely something we need to work on but you can find a huge amount of performance if you get it in the right window but the gap to Max and Ferraris is pretty extravagant.
“We are pretty used to having bad Fridays so let’s see if we can turn it around but I don’t think there will be any guarantees that we will be able to find the performance we found in the last race. But we will be working flat out tonight to get on top of it. But totally different conditions today.”
The warmer, drier weather expected over the weekend should help Mercedes in this regard.
Despite the difficult conditions at the end of the session, no one crashed, although Hamilton had a scary moment when the car snapped through the super-fast Eau Rouge sweepers in the wet and he ran off track collecting the car, but managed to keep it out of the barriers.
Shortly afterwards, Schumacher went off at the Malmedy right-hander at the top of the hill, before the rain became heavy enough for the drivers to abandon running on slick tyres.
Verstappen looking super-fast
Verstappen’s one-lap pace raised eyebrows, especially the way he achieved it.
Spa is a track which often requires a set-up choice – favour high downforce for the corners of the middle sector of the lap; or trim the car out for speed on the flat-out sections that dominate sectors one and two. The two choices usually yield similar lap times but the low-downforce choice is favourable for the race because it aids overtaking.
Verstappen was not only 0.6secs faster than anyone else in the middle sector, but was also competitive with his rivals on the straights, a formidable combination.
The Red Bull was especially strong in the change of direction in Turns Five, Six and Seven Les Combes and Malmedy at the start of the middle sector, Turns 12 and 13 – the medium speed Fagnes right-left – and the final chicane.
From Les Combes to the fast left at Pouhon alone, he gained 0.4secs on Leclerc.
The Red Bull’s advantage was smaller on the race-simulation runs later in the session, when he was 0.3secs up on Sainz’s Ferrari on the same medium tyre, but the session was cut short because of rain late on so the long runs were likely not that representative.
Giving hope to Ferrari was the fact that Verstappen pulled into the pits after just three laps of his race run complaining that his front tyres were already gone.