Up Next
The Styrian Grand Prix proved a lot more straightforward than its counterpart from last weekend, yielding a familiar Mercedes 1-2 and no shock podium finishers.
Yet some still punched above their weight, while some emphatically did not. Below, we chronicle the winners and losers of the event.
The winners
Lewis Hamilton
After a poor season opener by his lofty standards, Lewis Hamilton recovered in resounding fashion with an emphatic victory.
OK, he still trails team-mate Valtteri Bottas in the championship, but F1’s change of venue next weekend will be accompanied by a shift in momentum in Hamilton’s favour.
His brief moments of vulnerability, at the start and safety car restart, proved anything but. It wasn’t exciting for those watching, but it was textbook stuff from the six-time world champion.
And the perfect way to lay any ghosts from last weekend to rest. – Scott Mitchell
Lando Norris
Without wanting to get caught up in superlatives, Norris did an exceptional job.
He’s been battling a mystery problem all weekend manifesting itself in some quite severe chest pain at times, and who knows how much better it really was by the time the grand prix started.
Norris dusted himself down from his penalty and was well on his way to a very solid return when he got a sniff of something bigger and pulled out all the stops to deliver it.
McLaren will be disappointed to have hurt Carlos Sainz Jr’s race with a slow pitstop, but Norris’s exploits mean the team is still second in the championship! – Scott Mitchell
Racing Point – just
The Racing Point RP20 is a brutally quick car and will score serious points and probably several podiums this year.
It could’ve and should’ve hauled in more across the two races at the Red Bull Ring, especially in the second weekend – but the fact a pair of mere top-seven finishes can be seen as being at all disappointing is high praise for the car, especially as the two drivers started outside of the top 10 after a jumbled wet-weather qualifying.
Sergio Perez drove a mostly superb race from 17th to run as high as fifth, and could’ve even had the Red Bull of Alex Albon beat, only to clip the Anglo-Thai racer and break his front wing. He made the ultimately profitable call to stay out, contrary to team instructions, and was limited to losing just a single spot.
Lance Stroll was slower but nonetheless impressively combative, even if opinions may vary on his aggressive late move on Daniel Ricciardo that was been brought to the stewards’ attention before being declared a racing incident. – Valentin Khorounzhiy
Daniil Kvyat
Kvyat has not been much of a match for Pierre Gasly in qualifying since the latter’s demotion, but the Russian remains a very handy operator in the race and proved it again today – with a drive that maybe warranted more than just a solitary point.
Kvyat’s strategy was better than Gasly’s but he also made markedly more of it, hanging on for 10th on the same worn hard compound that Gasly ended up struggling with.
Considering the AlphaTauri AT01 did not look a particularly strong package in terms of race pace, it looks to have been as much as the team could’ve reasonably asked of him. – Valentin Khorounzhiy
The losers
Charles Leclerc and Ferrari
Like last week, it was another muted Friday and bruising Saturday for the Scuderia, but this time Sunday brought no respite. In fact, somehow it only got worse.
Leclerc has already held his hands up for the move that eliminated himself and Sebastian Vettel out of the race, as well as he should have done. Forget that it costs the team points (presumably – points for Ferrari on pure speed no longer look a guarantee), but Ferrari was also robbed of 70 laps worth of data on two cars that remain very much a work in progress.
It was also just a flat-out bad look – the Turn 3 move will not go down as anywhere near the worst of the season, but it was not exactly ambiguous either, and Leclerc knows as well as anyone it cannot happen again.
But in a way, it was a fitting end to Ferrari’s weekend, after its torrid performance in the wet in qualifying and Mattia Binotto’s blunt admission that the upgrades had not worked as hoped.
They say ‘when it rains, it pours’. Ferrari avoided the second part last weekend, but it received a double helping this time around. – Valentin Khorounzhiy
George Russell
After a superb qualifying performance, Russell was briefly as high as ninth on the first lap after a precise run through the first corner while battling with Stroll, before being shuffled back to 11th by the time the safety car was deployed.
While a points finish wasn’t possible because the pace of the Williams wasn’t strong enough, he didn’t need to make it easy for everyone and he did just that by trying to hang on around the outside of Kevin Magnussen at Turn 6 and ploughing into the gravel.
His apologetic radio message immediately after tells you everything to know about the missed opportunity, not just for the team but also for a driver keen to show that he could thrive in the cut and thrust of the upper midfield.
He finished 16th and ahead of team-mate Nicholas Latifi, but it took some of the shine off his qualifying performance to have made that error. He’ll be very frustrated not to have shown what he can do. – Edd Straw
Renault
Renault held sixth and seventh place early on with Esteban Ocon and Ricciardo but came away only with an eighth place for the latter.
Reliability proved a weakness again with Ocon retiring with cooling problems, just as Ricciardo did the previous weekend, while the Australian himself ended up crossing the line just behind the two Racing Points that he started well ahead of.
That’s frustrating considering he was in a position that could have resulted in a ‘Class B’ victory in fifth place. He was behind only Sainz in the first stint once Ocon was made to let him past. Starting on the mediums then running long on softs didn’t help his race, but the fact both Racing Points got ahead of him on the road suggests Renault is still not quite able to deliver on its ambition of being the midfield ‘winner’.
With McLaren picking up another solid helping of points, Renault is now 31 behind with Racing Point already 14 ahead.
The car isn’t quite quick enough, yet, and it certainly isn’t reliable enough. – Edd Straw
Alex Albon
Simply put, being three-quarters of a minute off the race lead, and nearly beaten by a Racing Point, in a car that was a comfortable second for most of the grand prix is not good enough.
Let’s see if it transpires Albon was battling a problem of sorts. It would be good for his confidence if that proves to be the case, because Albon’s much better than this.
Albon had nothing to show for his window of opportunity last weekend but never looked close to being on Verstappen’s level in the second part of this double-header.
Yes, he finished fourth, but he was lucky to even get that. And it was such a distant fourth that if this was a legitimate result it simply can’t be considered a positive. – Scott Mitchell
