PACE DEBRIEF: Red Bull a tenth ahead of McLaren, Mercedes overtook Ferrari
Red Bull driver Max Verstappen has dominated proceedings at the Austrian Grand Prix so far, with the RB20 having been just over a tenth quicker than the second-quickest McLaren. F1Technical’s pitlane reporter Balazs Szabo delivers his pace analysis from the 100km Spielberg Sprint.
Following the Spanish Grand Prix, the F1 field headed to Austria for this sprint weekend of Spielberg. Interestingly, although the Red Bull Ring poses a completely different set of challenges to the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, the pecking order has hardly changed between the two circuits.
The opening day of the Austrian Grand Prix suggested that Max Verstappen would enjoy a slight advantage over the McLarens of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri. The Dutchman was just a tenth quicker than Norris in sprint qualifying while Mercedes were a further two tenths behind with Ferrari trailling the Brackley-base outfit by a tenth of a second.
All in all, the pecking order was headed by Red Bull, followed by McLaren, Mercedes with Ferrari slipping down to fourth place.
The picture hardly changed for Saturday’s main qualifying session, although Red Bull’s reigning champion increased his advantage to over three tenths of a second.
But what has happened in the 100km sprint race? Crucially and surprisingly, the order was almost the same with the gaps also very similar to the margins from qualifying.
Verstappen complained about sliding in the opening stages of the sprint, with the two McLarens displaying slightly better pace initially, helped also by the drag reduction system. The latter is fairly powerful around the Red Bull Ring given its length that takes almost a third of the entire track.
However, as the race unfolded, Verstappen managed to pull away from the McLarens. Comsidering the entire length of the sprint race, the Dutchman was over a tenth per lap quicker than Piastri and exactly two tenths faster than Norris.
Interestingly, Verstappen and Norris had a boxplot of the same length while Piastri’s one was slightly longer given his fading pace in the dying stages of the race.
Mercedes and Ferrari were both slightly off with George Russell emerging as fastest from the quartet. The Briton was 0.26s slower per lap than Verstappen, followed extremely closely by Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz (3 tenths). The Spaniard overtook Russell at the start, but the Mercedes man came back later to retake his place as he had better pace mid-way through the race.
However, the Madrid-born driver brought his tyres back into a more promising working window, and slightly closed in on Russell as the sprint neared its conclusion.
Behind the pair were Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc. The Briton had an identical pace to Sainz with their boxplot being also the same, meaning very similar lap times across the entire length.
Despite the extensive host of upgrades introduced in Spain a week ago, Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc was even slower than Sainz.
With both Ferrari drivers complaining about severe bouncing in the high-speed corners of Barcelona and Spielberg, Leclerc was almost half a second per lap slower than Verstappen, and his fading pace in the second half of sprint was confirmed by the length of his boxplot.
