Alright in Austria

Surprisingly this years Styrian Grand Prix has so far claimed the unfortunate title for one of, if not the most, boring race we’ve had this season. Red Bull once again had superior race pace to the Mercedes who thought they were losing +0.250 of a second to the Red Bulls on the straights.

That deficit goes someway to explaining the 15 second gap Verstappen had pulled out on Hamilton before he decided to pit and go for fastest lap. Hopefully this isn’t typical of the rest of the season and there’s a good chance it won’t. The Red Bull Ring has very long straights with very few corners especially the run from turn 1 to turn 3 up the hill and it’s something that isn’t repeated for the rest of this season in quite the same way.

Even next weekends Austrian Grand Prix, not be confused with the Styrian Grand Prix, despite them being on the same track, has the ability to be a significantly different kind of race with Pirelli going a step softer on the tyre compounds.

It means everyone who immediately swapped to the Hard tyre won’t have that luxury and everyone will be trying to go through Q2 on last weeks soft tyre which lasted some 30+ laps in the hands of Lando this weekend.

Speaking of Lando it was yet another great weekend for him and McLaren, Ricciardo on the other hand… You have to feel sorry for him, gaining four places on the first lap to then have a power issue on such a power sensitive track… all i’ll say is I hope it doesn’t knock his confidence because he has been getting better in the McLaren.

Ferrari had a significantly better weekend even if it didn’t look like it at first. Charles LeClerec made contact with Gasly in a silly accident that ended Gasly’s race but meant LeClerec had an early committal to the two stop strategy which allowed him to climb back to well inside the top 10.

Heartbreak unfolded once again for George Russell, what does that man need to do in order to catch a break? Two stops for a pneumatic pressure refill wasn’t enough to save his Williams on a weekend where he was running pretty comfortably in P8. Hopefully that pace can continue into the Austrian GP next week because Russell deserves some points on the board.

Further down the grid it wasn’t a great week for Esteban Ocon, ever since he signed his multi-year contract extension he’s not performed anywhere near the pace of Fernando Alonso, the difficult question being has Alonso finally found his pace in the Alpine or has Ocon faded since he put pen to paper?

Overall the Styrian Grand Prix was just, well, alright. Hopefully the Austrian variant has a bit more action, after all we did have a cracking race there last year.