What a difference a few hours can make.
Saturday started with a brief but blockbuster battle between Max Verstappen, Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri for victory in the sprint race. Red Bull Racing and McLaren had been split by practically nothing in sprint qualifying, and their respective performances in race trim appeared to promise that the rest of the weekend would be similarly closely fought.
But this is the Red Bull Ring, and the home team and its star driver aren’t so easily overcome.
Verstappen started qualifying with a remarkable Spielberg streak of six poles in a row dating back to 2021 — both the Styrian and Austrian grands prix — and including sprint poles last year and again this year.
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Red Bull’s home race has become the Dutchman’s fortress, and some small set-up changes on Saturday afternoon yielded massive results to bolster his authority.
After beating Norris to sprint pole on Friday thanks largely to one corner and better top speed, on Saturday he was just quicker everywhere — every corner and every straight.
The margin blew out by more than 400 per cent, from 0.093 seconds to 0.404 seconds.
It contrasted starkly with the 0.798 seconds that covered all 20 drivers in Q1, the closest spread in the history of this qualifying format.
“We tried to adjust the car a little bit after the things that we learnt this morning,” Verstappen said. “I think it went well.
“The car felt a lot better for me today. I could really attack the corners a bit more. Every run was just on point. It was very enjoyable out there.”
But while car changes contributed to Verstappen’s domination, the Max factor remains prominent.
Just compare him to the hapless Sergio Pérez.
Perez’s form slump isn’t just continuing, it’s getting worse.
After qualifying an underwhelming but traffic-affected seventh for the sprint, the Mexican tumbled another place to eighth and a whopping 0.888 seconds off his pole-getting teammate.
That’s practically a lifetime around the briefest lap on the calendar.
It followed him finishing 17.4 second behind Verstappen in the 23-lap sprint, a margin of around 0.75 seconds per lap.
Pérez lamented that he’d run out of fresh soft tyres for Q3, and while that’s true, it’s only because he needed to burn through his sets just to make it to the top-10 shootout to begin with, again contrasting him poorly with his teammate.
Perhaps Red Bull Racing won’t need Pérez in the title fight after all given the scale of Verstappen’s qualifying domination, but it’s more realistic that RBR will come under pressure from McLaren, if not victory then for points in the constructors championship.
I becomes harder every week to justify the two-year contract extension offered to him so hastily last month.
PIASTRI BLASTS ‘EMBARRASSING’ TRACK LIMITS DEBACLE AFTER LOST TIME
Is this the first time we’ve seen Oscar Piastri truly worked up?
The Australian is enjoying a return to form after his unusual off weekend in Spain last time out. He qualified third and finished second in the sprint, and he was on track to at least equal the feat with another third in qualifying for the grand prix.
But then that most-hated issue of track limits reared its head.
Last year stewards were forced to grapple with more than 1200 allegations of track limit violations. To avoid that farcical situation, this year the kerbs have been shrunk to less than the width of the cars and have had gravel placed alongside them. In effect the track becomes self-policing — if a driver runs wide, they’ll be slower for dipping a wheel in the stones.
But all the same Piastri was pinged for running wide exiting turn 6 on the run to turn 7. Replays showed it was extremely marginal at best, but the time was wiped without discussion, dropping him to seventh.
The usually mild-mannered Melburnian was ropeable.
“It’s embarrassing,” he told Sky Sports. “We do all this work for track limits, put gravel in in places, and I didn’t even go off the track; I stayed on the track.
“I don’t know what they spent hundreds of thousands — millions — trying to change the last two corners when you still have corners you can go off.
“For me that was probably the best turn 6 I took. I was right at the limit of the track. I think that’s what everyone wants to see. We’ve spent so much effort trying to get rid of these problems.
“There is no reason this corner should be an issue for track limits, especially when you stay on the track, like I did, or not in the gravel.
“Obviously being the only one that’s had that happen to me, I’m probably more vocal about it right now, but I think it’s embarrassing that you see us pushing right to the limit of what we can do, and if I’m on centimetre more, I’m in the gravel and completely ruin my lap anyway, and it gets deleted.”
McLaren principal Andrea Stella was seen heading to race control after the session for further information, with the team appearing deeply sceptical of the fairness of the penalty.
There are few examples of deleted lap times being reversed. Norris had his pole time reinstated during sprint qualifying in China, but that had more to do with conditions than a fundamental ruling on track limits.
Sergio Pérez had a deletion reversed at the 2022 Hungarian Grand Prix after the review of additional footage.
There was no movement on the issue or appeal underway at the time of writing.
Starting seventh will have a material impact on McLaren’s race. If the team harbours hope of overcoming Verstappen for victory, it will need both drivers in the battle to apply maximum strategic pressure.
Without the in-form Aussie in the fight, the bid for victory against a rejuvenated Verstappen will be that much harder.
‘AMATEUR’ NORRIS LETS SPRINT WIN GO BEGGING
Earlier on Saturday we got a taste of the battle that could be on the cards on Sunday, but Norris will be hoping he can change the flavour.
The Briton started from the second row and put on a good show attacking Verstappen for the lead. After several parries, on lap 5 he burst into the lead with a peach of a move at turn 3, hitting the brakes super late to block pass down the Dutchman’s inside.
But his superb work was undone just seconds later with some lazy racecraft.
Having just been passed, Verstappen wasn’t entitled to DRS down to turn 4. All Norris had to do was pin Verstappen to the outside line, where he wouldn’t have had the top speed to pass back.
But the Briton bizarrely opened the door to the apex as he hit the brakes. Verstappen doesn’t need asking twice, and he rammed himself into the gap to take back the lead.
Worse, the mistake left Norris exposed to teammate Oscar Piastri, who followed Verstappen through and confirmed second for himself.
“I knew there were not going to be too many opportunities to try to [pass], so I had to go for a bit of a move into turn 3,” Norris said. “And then I was just pretty stupid into turn 4.
“I messed it up and left the door open like an amateur.
“We’re saying [that victory got away] every weekend now, so I’m not going to say it again, but I should have done [it].
“I needed to do a better job, and I just did something pretty stupid and silly, which was not very smart of me.”
Would defending turn 4 have been enough to cement victory? Sprint qualifying suggested Verstappen would have been very strong with DRS enabled, but we’ll never know for sure.
Norris has a reputation for being extremely hard on himself, having slammed his driving for extremely minor indiscretions in the last month or so as victories have come into the frame for McLaren, but for the first time this season his self-criticism was warranted.
It demonstrates — yet again, as if it needed to be underlined — that to defeat Verstappen, a driver must operate at a consistently very high level. Norris is still fractionally below it.
“I know I’ve done a things that aren’t good enough and things that aren’t at the level that they need to be,” he said.” I’m doing my best to improve on them, and that’s all I can do for now.”
The good news is he isn’t far off, and that bodes well for the grand prix.
MAX INTERVENES IN CHRISTIAN-JOS FEUD
The previously dormant feud between Christian Horner and Jos Verstappen appears to have required nothing more than a miscommunication to spectacularly reignite — and draw in reigning champion Max Verstappen.
Earlier in the weekend Jos had told the Dutch media he was withdrawing from ‘legends parade’ demonstration event because he believed Horner had banned all filming and photography of the former F1 driver at the Red Bull event.
“How childish can you be?” he told Formule1.nl. “I’m completely finished with Horner. It’s like a kindergarten here.”
Horner denied he’d attempted to bar the father of his star driver from the event.
“There was no veto from my side or anything like that,” he said, before adding the zinger: “And I’m sure the legends will be in action later”.
Now Max has weighed in on the issue, which is threatening to engulf the team once more after the explosive first few rounds of the season.
“It’s not nice — I think not for myself, not for my dad, not for Christian, not for the team,” he said. “You don’t want these things to happen.
“My dad has been quite clear about the reason behind it, and of course I can understand his opinion on that, because at the end of the day he gets asked to drive the car [and then] finds out that he’s not wanted to drive the car.
“And the other hand: I’m here of course to focus on the performance side of things, so I want a good relationship with everyone.
“This scenario could have been avoided.”
But Autosport has since reported the issue started significantly less controversially, with Red Bull Racing, not Horner directly, querying whether Jos should appear in photos and videos on its in-house media service given the controversy he generated earlier this year. It wasn’t intended to be the blanket ban Jos has since said he believes it to be.
But while this latest spat appears to have been caused by an apparent crossing of wires, the repercussions are that Max has had to become involved again, and his comments have made clear that he buys his father’s version of events.
The relationship between Horner and Max appears to have largely been patched up since the flashpoints of the start of the season, but his commentary this weekend was a subtle reminder of where the power balance lies between them.
RICCIARDO TARGETS POINTS AFTER QUALI BOUNCE
After a tough sprint qualifying and short race, Daniel Ricciardo bounced back in the grand prix grid-setting session to pick up where he’d left off in the last couple of rounds, leading teammate Yuki Tsunoda as RB’s lead driver.
It wasn’t quite a return to the team’s Canada form, but Ricciardo cracked Q2 and missed on a spot in the top 10 by just 0.015 seconds was everything the VCARB-01 had in it as the team continues troubleshooting where its Spain upgrade has gone wrong.
It also takes the heat off questions about Ricciardo’s future for at least another day.
Speaking on Saturday night, the Aussie said he was proud the team could bounce back from such a sad Friday qualifying to move back towards where it’s belonged for so much of this season.
“We made a lot of progress since yesterday — obviously this time yesterday we were out in SQ1,” he said. “We’re at least in the fight today, and that’s something we have to be proud about.
“It puts us in a much better position.”
Ricciardo pinned his disappointing personal sprint results down to the need to experiment with set-up and upgrade parts as part of the troubleshooting progress on a weekend that affords drivers just one hour of practice, leaving him on the back foot.
“We changed the car a lot yesterday,” he said. “But today we obviously had a little bit more time to get used to the changes.
“I felt like every run we did, every lap we were more or less there. Happier with stringing good as together.”
If he can convert 11th into a point or two, he’ll be able to consider Austria a tick in his bid for a new contract.