The real redemption story in Austria

The motor racing adage that you are only as good as your last race never rings truer than in Formula 1. Teams and drivers can go from hero to zero and back again from one weekend to the next.

The Austrian Grand Prix was certainly no exception to this rule. Mercedes, a mighty powerhouse that has captured four consecutive title doubles, faced up to its most painful of races and now needs something of a reset in Britain this weekend.

But the Red Bull Ring wasn't just a story of failure, because the Austrian Grand Prix also presented us with an uplifting narrative of reputational rescue.

For the driver in question it was a timely demonstration of his potential, having endured more than his fair share of incidents and dark times earlier in the campaign. This was a performance of the highest calibre.

As a top line F1 star, performing to your best week in, week out is so much about confidence levels and having the mental strength to balance your risk/reward approach to every scenario.

Crashing once may not affect your approach too much. But when the incidents follow one another from weekend to weekend, and when those incidents come to define a grand prix not just for yourself but for other drivers caught up as collateral, it can become a negative spiral - or at least bear all the trappings of one.

Perception is all in Formula 1. Narratives quickly become established.

And yet this is an ultra-competitive sport, so you cannot simply choose not to fight for position at every opportunity. In any case, consciously trying to avoid trouble doesn't necessarily mean you won't encounter it anyway.

Equally, if you become consumed with desperation to get a good result and start taking more risks, then you're in danger of adding yet more incidents and failed scoring opportunities to the demerit column. This applies just as much - perhaps even more so - within the clutch of teams battling for points in the back half of the top ten as it does to those aiming for overall championship honours.

Walking that tightrope is the true test of character. To ignore all those around you urging you to change, and instead keep your own convictions, is not an easy thing to do.

So it was kind of fitting that on the same weekend that Max Verstappen showed every bit of his old maximum-attack aggression, hustling past Kimi Raikkonen en route to a win that has wiped away talk of his early season calamities, so too Romain Grosjean finally produced a weekend to remember.

It was almost hard to believe that the man who was all set to bag the 'best of the rest' spot in the season-opening Australian Grand Prix before a pitstop problem put him out, had got to this stage of the season without scoring a point.

But through a mix of mistakes, problems and plain bad luck, Grosjean was facing a scenario where no matter what he did, it was going to go wrong.

To ignore all those around you urging you to change, and instead keep your own convictions, is not an easy thing to do

Australia was the pitstop disaster. In Bahrain, a recovery drive was ruined by pieces of bargeboard falling off. China was wrecked by the bad timing of a safety car after Haas gambled on an alternative strategy. A possible podium in Azerbaijan went begging when Grosjean flicked the wrong switch while running behind the safety car, locking his rear wheels and pitching him into a spin.

Spain was over at the first corner with that spin across the track, while Monaco was a lost cause since the Haas was not at its best in that environment. In Canada, a groundhog strike and that bizarre engine failure before qualifying put paid to a decent result, before a particularly frustrating French GP when a spin in qualifying and a double tangle on the first lap wrote off his afternoon.

While responsibility for some of the crazy run of incidents did lay at Grosjean's door, he was equally desperately unlucky that surrounding his own errors were other factors that made his situation appear much worse than it was. What else could he have done to avoid sitting out qualifying in Canada?

Even so, it was clear the pressure on him - at a time when team-mate Kevin Magnussen was having a brilliant campaign - was mounting. But the Haas management kept faith even if at times - especially post-Baku and Barcelona - things looked pretty bleak.

As team boss Gunther Steiner said: "After an event like what happened in Baku and Barcelona, for sure the emotions straight after the event are very high. But I think he came back to himself very quick. We spoke about it and said 'just keep on doing what you're doing and it will come to us'.

"We know the car was there, so his confidence was OK. Sure if he would have 50 points now his confidence would be higher, but now he knows he needs to work hard and he can get points."

"Hopefully we won't be talking at the end of the year about the first seven or eight races but instead about the second half that was amazing" Romain Grosjean

Of course, battling back from the abyss is something of which Grosjean has experience. From the 'first lap nutcase' who earned himself a race ban in 2012, he recovered to become one of the sensations towards the end of '13 as he pulled off a hat trick of podiums in Korea, Japan and India and became a thorn in Red Bull's side.

It's what has encouraged him to keep his chin up now: especially because what he has experienced in 2018 so far is not as bad as what he went through six years ago.

"I was being badly criticised by other drivers, drivers that I respect," said Grosjean of 2012. "And I was creating big problems, safety things, that didn't go right.

"Some were fully my fault, some were a bit more borderline. But anyway it was a tougher time than it is now. It's not easy right now and obviously we want more for the team, but if you look at all the races, some I could have done much better and others it's just circumstances."


After Austria, Steiner hailed his team's best-ever result in F1, in a season when it's so far struggled to nail a perfect weekend, as "redemption".

That word rings as true for its driver as much as it does for the team.

Ahead of the race, Grosjean had again been asked about the nightmare start to the campaign, the pressure to perform and whether his future was perhaps on the line. Patience was starting to wear thin.

"Hopefully we won't be talking at the end of the year about the first seven or eight races but instead about the second half that was amazing, like it was in 2013...." he smiled.

Based on what we saw in Austria, maybe history is about to repeat itself.