Lewis Hamilton lays down the challenge to Sebastian Vettel in Belgium

An impressive Lewis Hamilton lay down the title gauntlet to Sebastian Vettel after soaring to the top of the time sheets in second practice for the Belgian Grand Prix.

Hamilton, who will take part in his 200th race on Sunday as Formula One returns to action following its summer hiatus, finished 0.262 seconds clear of Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen, while Vettel was only fifth.

The fast-sweeping nature of this famous Spa-Francorchamps circuit is expected to suit Hamilton's Mercedes team, and on the evidence of practice, the Briton will be in prime position to get his stuttering championship assault back on track on Sunday.

“It's great to be back!” Hamilton said. “Today felt like one of our strongest Fridays so far this season. The car felt strong all-round straight out of the box. We made some good steps with the set-up right from the start of FP1, which is a really encouraging way to kick off the weekend. It looks tight at the top on the long-run pace, but we've started the weekend in the best way possible.”

Despite the excitement of the restart of the F1 season after its summer break, it was a relatively quiet day in Francorchamps, as the main news focused on what McLaren are going to do for their engine supply in 2018, and whether Renault really will take the plunge and bring Robert Kubica back to frontline motorsport.

McLaren have been dissatisfied with Honda’s performance since they came back in 2015, and in Monaco divorce seemed inevitable. But since then both Mercedes and Ferrari have said they won’t supply them with engines, ostensibly because the FIAs' regulations forbid manufacturers from supplying more than three teams. Each have their own cars to supply, plus Mercedes have Force India and Williams, while Ferrari have Toro Haas and Sauber. That leaves Renault as the only alternative, but they too have indicated that that could be difficult for similar reasons, as they supply their own team, plus Red Bull and Toro Rosso.

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“Renault have three teams,” said managing director and team principal Cyril Abiteboul. “We are open to discussions with McLaren, but there is the restriction in the regulations if you want supply more than three teams, and we do not thing it reasonable to believe we would be able to supply more than three teams without not degrading the service to other teams who are contacted to us. So things are very quiet and we are not necessarily proactively pushing for anything.”

McLaren’s executive director Zak Brown was also cagey. “We are not going to give running commentary on our power unit situation. We’ll say something when we have something to say. Like all racing teams we are heavy into 2018, so we need to be finalising all of our activities, drivers and car design. That all starts to happen soon with the timetable we have to get ready to follow next year.”

McLaren this week confirmed that young Belgian star Stoffel Vandoorne will remain with the team, and of course their primary aim is to retain Fernando Alonso’s services, too. But the Spaniard is restless as he watched his best years slipping away, and is known to have little faith in Honda making sufficient progress with their engine to produce a podium-finishing car, let alone a potential winner.

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Honda confirmed that a modified engine is available here, for Vandoorne, but engineer Yasuki Hasegawa admitted that rather than the Spec 4 version it “is closer to Spec 3.5, 3.6.”

Honda, however, have been working with engine designer Mario Illien of Ilmor Engineering, who has been consulting on single cylinder performance. The Swiss was a key figure in designing the Mercedes engines used to such great effect by McLaren when Mika Hakkinen won his world championships in 1998 and ’99, and is believed to be a potential figure if McLaren decide to build their own engines when the rules change for 2021.

Kubica, meanwhile, is working towards an F1 comeback after the grievous arm injuries he suffered on the Ronda di Andora Rally in February 2011. At the time he was Renault’s F1 team leader, but had signed a pre-contract to join Alonso at Ferrari for 2012. Recently he showed great speed testing a 2012 Renault, and again in the current car after the Hungarian GP. But Abiteboul admitted that the latter test had not been sufficient to answer all of the questions despite a competitive showing.

“We need to be methodological and to leave emotion on the side,” Abiteboul said, “and we didn’t get all the answers that we wanted. In a perfect world want to do more to see if he can race at the level that he and we wanted, so we have to wait and see. So many other things need to be factored in, and I don’t want to go further into this or to create speculation. We would all like Robert to be back, but it has to make sense.”