Mark Hughes: Why Hamilton’s right to fear Red Bull in Austria

The Red Bull Ring presents a very different set of demands to Paul Ricard but the competitive picture at the front looks quite familiar, and that will be worrying for Lewis Hamilton.

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Max Verstappen topped the times of both FP1 and FP2 (though Hamilton shaded him in the latter with a time that was deleted for Turn 10 track limits) and was convincingly quickest in the morning long runs and only slightly slower than Hamilton in the afternoon, despite a stint almost twice as long.

“The Red Bulls definitely will be really hard to beat,” Hamilton admitted. “I think they’ve just got the edge and we don’t know what they’re going to do when they turn that engine up.”

Mercedes also ran the day with a comfortable margin on engines, it should be pointed out.

It was notable that the Red Bull again had a stronger straight-line performance than the Mercedes, just as at Paul Ricard, although here that’s not as costly in lap time as at the French track. The margins here were small when DRS wasn’t being used, but bigger when it was. The three DRS zones here encourage a bigger wing than would otherwise be the prime choice, especially as it helps protect the rear tyres, on which there is invariably some significant thermal degradation from the repeated acceleration zones.

The Mercedes was faster through the fast sweeps of Turn 6-7 and fairly equal through 9, but otherwise, the Red bull appeared to retain the edge.

The weather forecast had indicated a strong possibility of FP2 being rained out and so a significant amount of long-running was conducted in the morning session. As it turned out, the forecast was wrong, with just a few drops falling at the beginning of the session and the track remaining more or less dry throughout.

The track was around half a second faster in the afternoon but Honda was extremely well represented in the morning with Pierre Gasly’s AlphaTauri pipping Hamilton’s likely heavier Mercedes to second-fastest lap. Unfortunately, Gasly was unable to take part in the afternoon session as Honda spotted something on the telemetry it didn’t like the look of and didn’t want to risk the power unit.

Team-mate Yuki Tsunoda was not as happy with the balance of the car so we didn’t get a full reading on just where it might stack up. Gasly enters Saturday as something of a dark horse – especially as there is an extra grid position up for grabs courtesy of a three-place grid penalty for Valtteri Bottas for his spinning in the pitlane.

“We tried something different coming out of the box,” Bottas explained of his attempted start in second gear to avoid the wheelspin which cost some of the Merc’s pit loss in France, “and that’s why I spun”.

Bottas may find himself on the third, fourth or perhaps even fifth row of the grid on Sunday, and he’ll be of little help to Hamilton’s fight with the Red Bulls from down there.

Practice 2 Results

Bottas didn’t do a serious single lap run in the afternoon and Sergio Perez similarly concentrated on Red Bull’s long-running. That and Hamilton’s deleted fastest time paint a flattering picture for McLaren and Alpine in the list of fastest times, with Daniel Ricciardo and Esteban Ocon going second and third respectively, albeit around 0.4s adrift of Verstappen on a very short lap.

Nonetheless, this was a particularly good day for Ricciardo as he was matching McLaren team-mate Lando Norris right from the start of the weekend. The GPS traces suggest that McLaren was running both cars with a higher engine mode than the Red Bull and Merc, so again it’s difficult to get an accurate read.

Ferrari used the sessions as much to further investigate its front tyre limitations as preparation for the rest of the weekend. The team’s single lap times were therefore not representative either.

A more realistic picture of performance can be gained from the long runs, which show the Red Bull/Mercedes drivers closely matched and well clear of the rest. Verstappen’s hard-tyred run was only a couple of tenths slower than Hamilton’s soft run despite being comprised of 14 laps rather than eight.

The soft (C4) tyre is around 0.5s faster around here than the medium (C3) but over a stint, the medium looks much the better – if Alonso’s very strong run is anything to go on.

There is therefore good motivation to get through to Q3 on the medium – rear heat degradation will be the key – but the soft is around 0.5s faster over a single lap so the decision will likely be a lot more difficult than in Ricard.

The heavyweight contest for the sport’s biggest prize continues and, as Hamilton observed after FP2, “Red Bull is throwing some really good punches right now”.