Welcome The Austrian Grand Prix
Hamilton calls for F1 rule change amid Red Bull’s domination
Lewis Hamilton believes the FIA should introduce a date for when F1 teams are allowed to work on their next year’s car to try and prevent one team from getting or keeping a big advantage.
Red Bull go into the weekend having only been beaten once since Ferrari won this race las year. Max Verstappen holds a sixty-nine point lead over team-mate Sergio Perez at the top of the drivers’ championship with Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso a further nine points back.
Hamilton is ninety-three points behind the Dutchman. In the constructors’ championship, Red Bull hold a hundred and fifty-four-point lead over Hamilton’s Mercedes team in second.
Hamilton who won six titles in seven years when Mercedes dominated the sport between 2014 and 2020, would like to see a rule introduced to prevent teams being able to switch to developing their next car too early in the season.
Hamilton told Sky Sports, “The car (Mercedes’ W14) is moving in the right direction. I think ultimately it’s likely that bit by bit at the end of the year we will probably catch Red Bull, but that’s probably because they are already focusing on next year’s car.”
That’s the big issue which Hamilton has highlighted Mercedes’s dominance following the start of the hybrid era it took seven years for Red Bull to beat Mercedes to the driver’s title.
“They’re so far ahead, they don’t have to make any changes to this car anymore as they’re so far ahead. I think the FIA should probably put a time when everyone is allowed to start developing on next year’s car. Say August 1, that’s where everybody can start so that no one can get an advantage on the next year, cause that sucks.”
This would require a regulation change and I think it would be very difficult to see any of the teams agreeing to this it took twelve years since a cost cap was first suggested until one was introduced.
Mercedes optimism of continuing progress
Mercedes CEO and team principal Toto Wolff says he is optimistic that the team will continue to show progress this weekend. In Monaco, when Mercedes revised its concept it scored a double podium in Barcelona and Lewis Hamilton finished on the podium in Montreal.
Montreal was a surprise for the team because of Circuit Gilles Villeneuve’s slow-speed corners and the inherent weakness of the W14 and its lack of rear grip at low speed.
Mercedes will be introducing another “larger” upgrade at next weekend’s British GP at Silverstone, but Wolff hopes his team will show more improvement in Austria as they seek to be Red Bull’s closest challengers once again. Wolff told Sky Sports “There were plenty of positives to take from the last race in Canada,” Wolff said.
“Although we didn’t get both cars to the chequered flag, a podium was a solid result and we saw encouraging signs from our updated package. It’s a short lap in Spielberg and looks straightforward on paper; several long straights broken up by a range of slow, medium-speed and fast corners. But it’s a challenging one to put together and get right.”
“We will aim to build on the momentum we have generated over the past two races and continue our positive trajectory with the car. It’s a venue where the W14 should perform better than in Canada, but we won’t take anything for granted. As always, we will be working hard to maximise our performance and deliver strong results.”
I think Mercedes are coming back, it will be interesting if they can start to close the gap to Aston and then how that evolves into next years car.
Leclerc begins talks on Ferrari contract
Charles Leclerc has revealed he and Ferrari have “slowly” begun to discuss an extension to his contract, which currently runs out at the end of 2024. The Monacan is set to be a key player in next years driver market and There has been intense speculation about Leclerc’s Ferrari future after his and the team’s title challenge in 2022 fell apart.
During the early rounds of the season, Leclerc was linked with Mercedes as the German manufacturer is yet to sign Lewis Hamilton to a new deal alongside George Russell, talk that was quickly quashed by Mercedes CEO Toto Wolff. While Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur also said back at the Australian Grand Prix in April that he was “not scared at all” about the possibility of losing Leclerc post-2024 and that it was then “not the right moment” to start negotiations about a possible extension.
I wonder if these stories and reports are both a mixture of public negotiation, the press creating the story because of Ferrari falling short and going backwards in the constructors.
Ahead of the Austrian GP at the Red Bull Ring this weekend, Motorsport.com asked Leclerc if he had begun talks about extending his new deal following his team-mate Carlos Sainz explaining he wanted his own Ferrari future sorted this winter and Leclerc replied: “Slowly. We’re starting slowly to speak about it, yes.”
But Leclerc said that unlike Sainz, he does not “have any particular deadlines” for doing a new deal with Ferrari as he feels “like a year-and-a-half is a long way to go”. Adding “To be honest, it’s not really on my mind yet,” he added. “When I say we slowly started talking about it, it’s just here and there, but nothing special, nothing specific.”
Shortly afterwards, Leclerc appeared to row back on his previous comments, saying the discussions he had had with Ferrari were “just jokes here and there – nothing formal or specific”.
But further questioning from the media, question asking if he would also be keeping his options to possibly move to another team in 2025 open, Leclerc insisted that “I love Ferrari, so I’m happy here. I’m not saying that [I want to keep my options open].”
Regarding media discussion on hypothetical moves to Mercedes or elsewhere in his F1 future, Leclerc acknowledged that “it’s probably the first time in my career that I’m in this position” after his promotion from Ferrari junior entering F1 with Sauber in 2018 to the works squad the following year.
Alpine gets a ‘reality check’ from Aston Martin’s leap
Alpine CEO Laurent Rossi says Aston Martin’s leap up the grid this year has been a “reality check” for his team. Earlier this week the team announced a group of investors including the actor Ryan Reynolds will help Alpine “accelerate” progress towards the front of the field.
But he admitted Aston Martin’s leap from seventh last year to second in 2023 has changed perceptions of what is possible. Rossi told BBC News, “It was a reality check for Mercedes, Ferrari, us. We were comfortable thinking we were on the rise, and everyone else was and suddenly there is a guy leapfrogging all of us.”
Alpine will be looking to replicate the step forward shown by Aston Martin which has seen them fighting at the front, making its target of finishing fourth in the constructors and closing the more difficult if not impossible this season. But they say they wanted to finish fourth again, but move closer to the top three teams.
Instead, after eight races, Alpine are fifth in the constructors’ championship, while Aston Martin is third. When Alpine took over Renault’s entry in 2021 he announced a “100 race plan” to challenge for titles, roughly the end of 2024 beginning of 2025.
Rossi said: “It’s an industry that has been doing more or less the same thing for so long that it’s become a norm that it takes that much time to get there. It’s true for everything. It’s true for road cars.” He says its rivals may have done it more radically and that the team were beginning to question, for example why upgrades had taken so long to get upgrades to the car.
He says to get there the team had made be done too many validations and been too conservative, suggesting that the process could be shorter. Last month, Rossi accused the team of “dilettantism” and said the team had a “performance deficit and an execution deficit”.
Now, he says: “Being fifth right now in and of itself can be very different – you can be unlucky and have three podiums and whatever. Being fifth the way we did it, by making a couple of mistakes here and there – and it’s all across the value chain from [the chassis base at] Enstone to [the engine factory at] Viry to the track was not good. That’s what I didn’t like.
“I didn’t like the fact that a team that has been so good operationally for the past two years suddenly started not to perform at the same level. And so they corrected a lot of the things It is going back into the right direction. It goes back to the plan we had.”
Rossi has also suggested that the target to return to the front by/in 2025 could be delayed by a year to co-inside with the regulation change in 2026, that’s because as a knock-on effect of the delay of the 2021 regulations to 2022 because of the pandemic.
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News in Brief
Teams & drivers share responsibility over traffic
Pierre Gasly reckons teams, drivers and engineers all share a responsibility to ensure both qualifying sessions for this weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix are not blighted by traffic and blocking. The Red Bull Ring lap is the fifth-shortest on the 2023 calendar at 2.68 miles. However, its high-speed nature means that in a dry session, it is likely to produce the quickest time.
During qualifying their can be congestion of traffic as drivers back off following hot laps, the impact on having a lap compromised by being blocked, or from the stewards penalising drivers, meant that a congested qualifying session often disrupted entire weekends.
AlphaTauri to be rebranded
AlphaTauri is set to be renamed for the 2024 season as part of the team’s ongoing restructuring under new Red Bull management, according to Helmut Marko. We know that Franz Tost will step down and the team relocate to Bicester to boost ties with Red Bull and allow for greater collaboration with reigning constructors’ champion Red Bull to improve form and save money.
Aerodynamic testing regulations: Reset ahead of Austria
This weekend marks the halfway point in the calendar year and that means a huge reset for all the teams in their wind tunnel time based on their current position in the constructors.
The system was first used in 2021 and is reset every six months, so the period from January to June is dictated by the previous season’s constructor standings. While for the second half of the season its determined by the constructors’ standings on 1st July before the sprint race.
Red Bull lead the way in 2023, so they will have seventy per cent of the total aerodynamic testing allowance. However, part of their punishment for breaching the 2021 budget-cap regulations means a ten per cent cut on the original number, so they will only have sixty-three per cent instead until October, when the penalty expires in Mexico.
The total allowance increases by five per cent, from 70, all the way down to AlphaTauri in tenth, who will have 115 per cent of the default allowance (40 runs in wind tunnel per week).
Aston Martin finished seventh in the 2022 constructors’ championship, but are currently third ahead of the Austrian Grand Prix, so will lose 20 per cent of the aerodynamic testing time they had in the first half of 2023. Mercedes and Williams will lose ten percent with them staying the same place as they were post-Abu Dhabi in November.
Alpine, McLaren, Alfa Romeo and AlphaTauri will gain five per cent as they move up one spot from their positions at the end of last year.
Red Bull and Haas both keep the same amount of time they had in the first half of 2023 as part of the handicap, though Red Bull will gain three extra runs in their wind tunnel compared to what they have had in the first part of the year when their cost-cap penalty expires in October.
These regulations restrict the amount of testing bigger teams can do and are part of the levelling up agenda designed to close the field up. The period now will likely be more important for next year, rather than this season because most teams will begin to move their focus to the 2024 cars.
The sprint format
- Friday’s qualifying session set the grid for Sunday’s race, while Saturday will now feature a standalone double of the Sprint Shootout to dictate the order for the shortened 100km race that follows.
- Sprint shoot-out will feature three sessions of eight minutes in the standard Q1, Q2, Q3 knock out but the tyres will be mandated by Pirelli Mediums for Q1 and Q2 and softs for Q3
- There is no change to the awarding of points from 2022. The Sprint winner will score eight points, with that amount descending by a point for each of the top eight.
Talking Points Spielberg
Austria round nine of the season kick starts the July run into the summer break, four races in five weeks as well as two sprint weekends here at the Red Bull Ring and in Spa at the end of the month. Three of the four races at high-speed circuits and four circuits which have lots of heritage.
Twelve months ago Charles Leclerc got the better of Verstappen on F1’s last visit after a tight battle, but with Ferrari under new management. However, since then Red Bull has won all but one Grand Prix in Sao Paulo. Mercedes who won that race, appear to be on a resurgence having ditched their original concept.
Austria will see the season’s second sprint race. It is now the third year the sport has run these events and in the seven so far, Verstappen has won three, Valtteri Bottas two and Sergio Perez and George Russell one each.
This year’s format is different, however, with the sprint races now forming a stand-alone event with their own qualifying shoot-out. Perez won this year’s first sprint, in Azerbaijan, by overhauling pole sitter Charles Leclerc.
Red Bull remains the favourites for eight out of eight wins, with Verstappen beating Perez seven times while he has not retired from a race since Melbourne last April. Since then, he has only failed to make the podium on three occasions.
The last race, in Canada, was supposed to be on one of the most difficult circuits for Mercedes, yet they came away with third place and Hamilton was just 14 seconds behind Verstappen at the end.
The former champions have played down their performance, with engineering chief Andrew Shovlin stating there is “clearly a bit of pace to find before we’ll be worrying Max” but if they find that, Hamilton is at 10-1 for the win.
Last year, Ferrari was on better form and had both cars in the top three on the grid, with Leclerc going on to win the race. This year, however, they have only secured one podium with a third place for Leclerc in Azerbaijan. The fight for second looks to be between Aston Martin and Mercedes, with Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton having the upper hand over their teammates.
McLaren’s first performance upgrades
McLaren’s upgrades for this weekend will be the first ‘performance’ upgrades this season says Lando Norris. The British team has been once again on the back foot since Bahrain and that has caused them drop behind Alpine in the constructors, as well as giving the feeling of not being able to catch up.
Only Norris will run the new package this weekend in Spielberg, with Oscar Piastri getting the updates next week at Silverstone, before further developments will be introduced at the Hungarian Grand Prix. Norris said “The team have done a good job. We weren’t meant to have these bits here originally, it was only meant to be for Silverstone. So it’s good we have pushed through as many things as we could, especially with it being a Sprint Race – two races to potentially score points”
Piastri added: “The plan was to have it for both of us in Silverstone but the team have done a very good job of getting one set forward for this weekend. I’m looking forward to seeing how that performs.”
Giving the upgrades to Norris makes sense on several factors, statically this is his most successful circuit with two podiums, he is the most experienced driver and this circuit is in my view a really good performance gauge. that’s because of the high altitude aactingas a leveller in performance,
Tsunoda backs De Vries
Yuki Tsunoda believes teammate Nyck de Vries “will get there” as speculation mounts over the Dutchman’s future. The former Formula E champion has had a difficult first third of his first season in F1, where he has struggled to match his teammates consistency on pace.
He is one of two drivers yet to register points, alongside fellow rookie Logan Sargeant, although that is also partly due to an underperforming AT04. Pressure on De Vries has already started mounting, with Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko voicing his displeasure about the 2020-21 Formula E world champion’s performances so far.
Tsunoda has backed De Vries to turn things around once he gets settled. when asked by Motorsport.com in Austria about his new team-mate’s plight, Tsunoda replied, “I think Nyck just has to put it all together. I think the pace is there, so he just needs to find a good rhythm because so far in most of the races probably he struggled a lot in terms of consistency.”
“I think in the end he’ll get there because in past races and past results, with what he achieved he’s showing that he can do it, so I’m sure he’ll get there.” At the start of the season I think I described de Vries as ‘the most experienced rookie,’ but as we know for some drivers making that jump int F1 can be hard. Being a world champion in FE I think we expected more from him.
when asked by Motorsport.com if there were any comparisons to be made, and if that made him sympathise with the Dutchman, Tsunoda felt the two situations are hard to compare.
The Weekend Ahead
This weekend its Red Bull’s home race and their domination of the season makes it difficult if we have a straight forward race for them to be beaten. However Spielberg can throw up surprises 2019 saw Mercedes have a double retirement, and we know this is an old-school circuit.
Aston Martin, I still feel if Red Bull were to run into problems the most likely to pick up a win but we know Mercedes look still to be their closest challengers. Aston we now can conclude halfway through this season are genuinely in the fight for second, but now Mercedes are back regularly at the front. Red Bull are just too strong at the moment.
As we see at these sprint weekends every session matters, there is only one practice session going into qualifying. The thing to watch given this one of the shortest laps of the season the teams need to get the communication right, also being the highest circuit in the Styrian mountains weather can bubble up.
During practice on Friday lunchtime throughout practice and the qualifying sessions. We know that practice is normally busy at sprint weekends and we will see the track get faster and faster in qualifying. The battle I think we need to watch is between Aston Martin and Mercedes, in my view Mercedes have or is on the way to overtake Aston in terms of race pace, but Aston I still has the edge in qualifying.
Pierre Gasly pointed out today that teams, drivers and engineers all share the responsibility to ensure both qualifying sessions are not blighted by traffic and blocking. We see both in the race but mainly qualifying drivers seeking clean air and then getting found guilty of impeding by the stewards, they have looked to be stricter on that this year.
You can join us for coverage of this weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix with reports and analysis on our website and in This Grand Prix, on Sunday evening. Practice starts Friday at 13:30 CEST / 12:30 BST, Grand Prix qualifying 17:00 / 16:00, Sprint Saturday 11:00 / 10:00 sprint shootout 11:00 /10:00 and the race 15:30 and Grand Prix Sunday 15:00 / 14:00