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A win for Lewis but the signs are slightly ominous for him for the rest of the season because this track was supposed to be a Mercedes walkover.
Make no mistake, the Ferrari was faster. Vettel was able to stay within 2s of Hamilton the whole race, which is unusual and shows that the Ferrari had the legs on the Merc. The only thing keeping Vettel behind was the Merc's superior straight line speed and Hamilton's superb racing ability.
Hamilton gave a really fascinating insight into his race craft on interview afterwards. Vettel looked for all money like he'd pass Hamilton after the safety car restart. Lewis said that he only used 90% throttle from La Source up until Eau Rouge in order to keep Vettel as close as possible to his gearbox, which sounds completely counter-intuitive when you're trying to stay ahead of the guy. But his reasoning was that had Vettel been a bit further behind, he'd have got a bigger tow from the slipstream, a bigger slingshot down Kemmel and thus enough momentum to overtake. As it was Vettel got just enough tow to pull alongside but once out of Hamilton's wake the superior speed of the Merc kept Lewis in front. Lewis was thinking about all that with a 4x world champion up his chuff at 200mph. Great stuff.
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