Lewis Hamilton expecting Red Bull threat in Austria as championship leader talks up qualifying importance
The opening leg in the first triple-header in F1 history is over, and Lewis Hamilton scooped the major spoils from Max Verstappen, as Sebastian Vettel took himself and Valtteri Bottas out of the reckoning.
But the Austrian Grand Prix at the Red Bull Ring could see the opening of a whole new can of whoop-ass, to use Hamilton’s idiom.
Last year Bottas won the race narrowly from Vettel, who complained long and loud afterwards that the Finn had jumped the start even though the FIA’s technology proved conclusively that he had just been within the legal limit. Bottas would like nothing more than to set a disappointing 2018 season straight by repeating that feat, and Hamilton believes that the track should suit their latest Mercedes.
“I think Austria should be a fairly decent track,” he said on Sunday evening in France. “It’s been a decent track for us in the past, so I don’t see why it should be any different now. I think the car should be good there. I think the Red Bulls have been particularly quick there in the past because it’s quite a good downforce circuit, so it’ll be interesting.
“As you’re seeing, it’s great that our cars are quite close in qualifying nowadays, but positioning is everything really in qualifying there because at that track you can’t really overtake… Even though you’ve got those long straights, it’s very, very difficult to overtake because you can’t follow another car through Turn One. It’s going to be about who qualifies where, isn’t it?”
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Verstappen agreed that his and Daniel Ricciardo’s Red Bulls should be competitive on energy drink magnate Dietrich Mateschitz’s home ground.
“I think Red Bull have been on the podium for the last two races there,” Verstappen said. “We are a bit compromised on the straights but somehow it was always not too bad. I’m also looking forward to the weekend because I think a lot of Dutch fans are coming out so there’ll be a lot of orange around, so that’s always good.”
“Hopefully we can expect good things,” Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen said. “But it’s impossible to really say. It’s a slightly different circuit. We need to make a good weekend out of it. It’s going to be pretty close. I don’t see a massive difference between the top three times – but I might be wrong.”
Championship rival Vettel took himself and Valtteri Bottas out at the first corner in France (EPA)
As the Canadian Grand Prix recently demonstrated, it only takes something small to cost you pole position, and on tracks where passing is so difficult that can cost you the race, too. Ask Bottas. The guy who gets out front always enjoys an aerodynamic advantage of clean air, and doesn’t overheat his front tyres every time he gets close to the man ahead.
And though Red Bull’s Renault engine struggles to match either Mercedes or Ferrari on sheer pace in qualifying, when the latter pair can use more powerful engine mode settings, the fact that the cars from Milton Keynes have been quite close to the red and silver ones is encouraging for everyone who wants to see a genuine battle between the top three outfits.
The upgraded Mercedes engine received a lot of attention and praise over the weekend. It should have run in Montreal, but there were concerns over its reliability and while that was being fixed in time for the French race, the opportunity was taken to upgrade it a little further, from 2.0 to 2.1 specification. Though Hamilton believed it to be better, he did not suggest that Mercedes’ improvement was entirely down to it.
Lewis Hamilton takes a 14-point lead into the Austrian Grand Prix (Getty Images)
Likewise, after Canada Verstappen said he didn’t think the new Renault power unit was worth its estimated three-tenths of a second a lap. “Let them be optimistic,” he smiled. “It’s not 0.3s but every little step, every little gain, is of course positive. I wish it was 0.3s, but hopefully later on this season we get a bit more. We have to keep pushing.”
That philosophy underpins the attitude of all three of the top teams. Never give up, never stop developing, looking for an edge. The ebb and flow of technical development, usually of an aerodynamic nature, will likely see the advantage vacillate between Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull for the rest of the season as their convergence continues, and the team with the biggest armoury will most likely be the winner.
