Thrills and penalties galore
The Austrian Grand Prix had a little for everyone. There was good, mostly clean racing. The safety car was deployed three times. Nine drivers failed to finish the race — more than twice that of any race last year. An 11th-hour grid penalty for the title favourite and then a five-second time penalty late in the race for him. Double heartbreak for the home team. Two surprise podium finishers...
fourth in the nal classication despite taking the chequered ag in second.
But Albon, who was promoted to Red Bull from its “junior team” Toro Rosso midseason last year, should take equal blame for the loss of a sureshot podium nish and a possible rst race win. When racing resumed with 10 laps to go, the Thaibritish driver was on a fresh set of the fastest of the three tyre specs allowed for the race, while the two men in front were on worn sets of the slowest compound. Did Albon need to make a move on Hamilton within three turns? The answer he should be giving himself is NO. All he had to do was wait for clean air as the frontrunners pulled away and then use the DRS (dragreduction system) when it kicked in after two laps.
Red Bull will bemoan the wasted opportunities with Albon — he retired on lap 67 of 71 with electronics problems — and Verstappen, the winner at Spielberg in 201■ and ’19. Verstappen was on a dierent strategy from the rest of the top 10 starters, beginning the race on the mediumcompound tyres instead of the soft, which would have let him run a longer rst stint and then push his hard tyres in the second half of the race — a strategy that worked well for him last year. But electronic problems put paid to that plan as he pulled into the pits at the end of lap 11.
Ferrari was both a disappointment and a surprise at the Austrian GP. Charles Leclerc qualied seventh, but his teammate Sebastian Vettel didn’t make it out of Q2 and started only 11th. Neither was able to make real headway during the race, but after the third safety car period, Leclerc found himself fth and overtook Lando Norris on lap 64 and Sergio Perez two laps later to move up to third, which translated into second because of Hamilton’s penalty — a nish neither team, driver nor fan would have expected at the start.
As for Vettel, the less said the better. The rookie errors the fourtime world champion made when under pressure in 2019 don’t seem to have gone away; instead, they seem to have been exacerbated by the fact that his mistake in Austria came when trying to attack and not defend. The German was up to eighth by lap 31, behind the Mclaren of Carlos Sainz, the man set to replace him at Ferrari next year. As Sainz made an unsuccessful attempt to overtake Leclerc on the outside going into turn three, Vettel lunged down the inside, locked up
his wheels and ended up facing the wrong direction. He nished the race 10th, ahead of only the debuting Nicholas Lati in the Williams.
Mclaren’s Lando Norris put in a stunner of a nal lap to pip Hamilton to the nal step on the podium, after starting the race in a careerbest third — also owing to a Hamilton penalty.
As lap 71 began, Norris in fourth was a little over ve seconds behind Hamilton, who would have ve seconds added to his nal race time. The 20yearold then set the fastest lap of the race — a time identical to Verstappen’s fastest lap in 2019 — to cross the nish line about 4.■ seconds behind Hamilton, just enough for his rst podium in F1.
Prior to the race, Norris had admitted he had exceeded his own expectations by qualifying on the second row ahead of both Ferraris and the Mercedespowered Racing Point cars, and his performance in the race, along with teammate Sainz’s fth place, shows Mclaren nally has a car worth racing after being at best a mideld team for the better part of the last decade.
O the track, a split emerged as six of the 20 drivers did not join Hamilton in going down on one knee to support antiracism before the race, the most notable being Leclerc and Verstappen, though 19 drivers sported “End racism” Tshirts on the grid — Hamilton’s bore the message “Black lives matter.”
The FIA, the motorsports world ruling body, has pledged €1 million to F1’s “We race as one” diversity programme established by Formula One chief executive Chase Carey, who launched the initiative with $1 million of his own. The foundation is designed to help nance internships and apprenticeships in the sport for underrepresented groups by ensuring there are opportunities for them to full their potential.
For the rst time in the history of F1 racing, a circuit will host more than one race in a season. That honour goes to the Red Bull Ring, which will host the only running of the Styrian Grand Prix on July 12.
Hamilton, gunning for a recordequalling seventh world drivers title, has his own teammate as his biggest rival as of now, while Red Bull will look to overcome the double disappointment at its home track. And with only eight races conrmed at this time for the 2020 season, the acceptable margin of error is extremely thin.