How Red Bull reversed an old Mercedes advantage in the Styrian GP

Austria is far from flat. Indeed, the Red Bull Ring is situated in the Styrian mountains, with the first of two Formula 1 races to take place at the track in 2021 named after the state. The track itself is gorgeously undulating – from the peaks of the Turns 1 and 3 right-handers, sweeping around the rest of the 2.7 miles, ending with a pair of fast rights where the drivers just find it so tricky to stay on the road.

But two things in the second ever Styrian Grand Prix remained firmly flat: the lap chart positions of eventual winner Max Verstappen and runner-up Lewis Hamilton. For each of last Sunday’s 71 laps, F1’s 2021 title contenders occupied the two leading places in that order, as the championship followed something of a French GP thriller (for Paul Ricard at least) and an enthralling, bruising race in Baku with a much tamer affair this time.

Not that it will have felt that way for the dominant victor or his delighted team, taking its third win on home turf from a first pole here. Even for Mercedes, the latest chapter in 2021’s close title fight might have featured a lack of action, but it also may have exposed something of a key difference in how the Black Arrows squad now fairs against its rival on race days, which goes back to its most recent win – four races and seven weeks before at Barcelona.

When the lights went out last Sunday, Verstappen and Hamilton got away effectively in unison, with the Dutchman using the extra ground afforded to his higher grid spot to sweep ahead of the Mercedes on the run to Turn 1. As Verstappen was serenely building a 0.95s lead at the end of the first tour, it was all rather kicking off behind him.

Coming out of Turn 1, Charles Leclerc and Pierre Gasly nearly touched, as they scrapped over sixth with Fernando Alonso on the inside, with the Ferrari and AlphaTauri taking to the runoff. As they swept back onto the track and raced up to the tight right of Turn 3, Leclerc made it two-for-two in Styrian GPs by getting involved in a needless incident that spoiled his and a rival’s race.

Valtteri Bottas, Mercedes W12, Fernando Alonso, Alpine A521, Pierre Gasly, AlphaTauri AT02, Charles Leclerc, Ferrari SF21, and the remainder of the field at the start

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

But it wasn’t at Turn 3, where his mistake wiped out Ferrari team-mate Sebastian Vettel in 2020, as this time he clattered Gasly’s left-rear as they headed up the hill. This broke the right-hand side of Leclerc’s front wing, which forced him to pit and begin a remarkably excellent recovery to seventh at the finish, but gave Gasly a race-ending puncture.

The AlphaTauri driver was then barely able to drive straight when he reached Turn 3, where he punted around Antonio Giovinazzi’s Alfa Romeo and then gave Nicholas Latifi a puncture with yet more contact in the run off beyond as they swept by. Gasly recovered to the pits where he retired with suspension damage. FIA race director Michael Masi reviewed the Leclerc/Gasly clash, but it was quickly determined “a first-lap-type matter” that did not warrant a full investigation or penalty.

The leaders had traversed Turn 3 without contact, but as Verstappen was racing clear in first place, Hamilton was playing an unwitting part in the fight for third between Lando Norris – who’d started there – and Sergio Perez, boosted up to fourth on the grid by Valtteri Bottas’s FP2 pitlane spin penalty. As Hamilton initially took the inside line to Turn 3, Perez took advantage of Norris being slightly boxed in behind to run around the outside of the McLaren. He then chased Hamilton on the downhill, sightly meandering straight to Turn 4, where Norris made an identical play, and forged back to third on the outside line – close to getting alongside Hamilton as well, such was his late braking.

“As soon as we stopped to go on the hard, honestly that was a really enjoyable stint just to drive” Max Verstappen

That move cemented the 2021 Styrian GP as a two-horse race. By the time he stopped on lap 26 – having passed Norris with an easy move into Turn 3 on lap 10 (which Norris said came from a deliberate decision not to defend to avoid being “a lot more vulnerable at the end of the race” if he’d wasted time fighting the faster cars) – Perez had been 20s off the lead.

The gap was such that to have any chance of disrupting Verstappen’s flat line of lap chart perfection in first place, Hamilton would have to somehow alter his own stable progress – either by overtaking on track or with Mercedes making a bold call on strategy.

But both of those possibilities were removed by Verstappen’s pace in the lead. Over the course of the first stint, he pulled clear of Hamilton by 0.174s a lap – only twice, fractionally, falling out of the 1m09s bracket in a metronomic run the Mercedes couldn’t match.

Verstappen extended his lead to a maximum of 5.5s by the time he came in to switch the medium tyres he, Hamilton and Bottas had started on, for a fresh set of hards. Red Bull team boss Christian Horner recognised afterwards that “was the first time we've managed to break keeping them within a DRS” so far this year.

Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing RB16B

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

“It was important to have a good start and that first stint was all about managing the tyres a bit and I could see the pace was quite strong while looking after the tyres,” Verstappen later reflected. “It has been sometimes a bit different in previous races, so we worked quite hard to try to make that better and today that was very good.”

Perez’s pitstop kicked things off for the leaders coming in and also made his afternoon much harder. After starting on the softs as a result of Red Bull opting to split its starting tyre strategies, he’d been keeping Bottas at bay – the Mercedes driver having passed Norris to take fourth a lap after Perez’s Turn 3 move in almost identical fashion. But during his stop, a slow left-rear change kept Perez stationary for 4.8s.

“It should have been comfortable for him to retain track position to Bottas, but unfortunately we had a problem with a left rear,” Horner explained. “We didn't get cleanly onto the wheel.”

With Bottas running the mediums, Mercedes had not been considering bringing him in so early, but with F1’s typically fastest pitstop crew (until the new technical directive governing service times comes into force at the upcoming Hungarian GP) thwarted, it didn’t hesitate.

“We were quite reactive,” Bottas said of the decision to bring him in the next time by after Perez’s botched stop, which left him clear in third as they raced back up to speed at the pitlane exit.

Hamilton was the next ‘Class A’ runner to come in, switching to the hards at the end of lap 28, with Verstappen following him in one tour later. The Briton had been giving it his all as the first stint came to a close, at one stage on lap 25 even dipping his left-rear wheel in the gravel at the exit of Turn 4, nearly causing him to spin. He said he was “just ragging the lights out of the car and that was it – just giving it absolutely everything and every bit of the road possible to try and match Max’s times, but even with that excursion, it wasn’t possible”.

After stopping, Mercedes told Hamilton to push, to see if the compound change would knock the leader off course. This and the undercut factor, nowhere near as big as it had been seven days previously at Paul Ricard, meant that when the pitstop sequence had shaken out at the end of lap 30, Verstappen’s lead was down to 4.5s. But any hope Mercedes had of it tumbling significantly were dashed when Verstappen reeled off a pair of laps in the 1m08s (a bracket he rarely left for the rest of the race) just when the lead fell to 4.1s on lap 33. His advantage started to grow once again.

“As soon as we stopped to go on the hard, honestly that was a really enjoyable stint just to drive,” said Verstappen.

Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes W12

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

The second, larger, part of the race was dominated by the leading duo negotiating traffic, as every driver up to Perez was lapped. Even Norris, secure in a “lonely, straightforward” race to fifth, came home without completing the full distance. This wasn’t an easy task as there were many battles raging up and down the grid, with a DRS train extending a long way from the lower reaches of the top 10 for much of the race.

But despite this, Verstappen’s lead just grew and grew. Over the 38 laps that followed his out-lap, he was on average 0.334s per lap quicker than his rival, who had gone back into tyre preservation mode when it became clear Verstappen had an answer to his early pace on the hards. Not even a brake pedal problem that left Verstappen reporting a “BBW fail”, twice with his pedal “quickly just [falling] a bit to the floor in between Turns 9 and 10 while braking”, could halt his march.

The game was up and Mercedes knew it. On lap 69, with Hamilton enjoying a 28s gap to Bottas in third, it brought him in to take the soft tyres and chase the fastest lap bonus point on the last lap. Unlike in Portugal, Mercedes’ timing meant Red Bull had no opportunity to bring Verstappen in for a response, and so the one (very) minor negative note of his weekend followed, as his title rival stole back a point with a 1m07.058s fastest lap on the final tour.

Bottas’s presence in the post-race press conference gave him the chance to offer a theory on why the Black Arrows couldn’t match Red Bull last Sunday: “If we want to keep up with them, we can’t do as much tyre management”

The real intrigue in the closing laps concerned Perez and Bottas, after Red Bull had gone aggressive on strategy for the second race in a row. This time it brought its second car in for an extra stop in an effort to get it back on the podium, switching Perez to a two-stopper on lap 54. This gave him a 20.3s gap to close back on Bottas. He duly did at an average rate of 1.2s a lap, with both drivers having to contend with backmarker interference (with five tours to go Bottas struggled to lap McLaren’s Daniel Ricciardo as his “tyres were finished”).

“We had looked at that two-stop option, and decided that it wasn’t worth it,” said Mercedes’ director of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin. “We knew it was close, it just wasn’t worth giving up the podium position to try and win it back. So, it wasn’t a great surprise when they went for it.

“Actually the thing that was a surprise was when they pulled the trigger. It said that Perez would catch him on the last lap, but he wouldn’t get through. And it was a relief to see that on this occasion, the tools were absolutely spot on [after Mercedes’ modelling had predicted Hamilton would catch Verstappen much later than he did in Spain and suggested he was safe from the undercut in France].”

Valtteri Bottas, Mercedes W12, Sergio Perez, Red Bull Racing RB16B

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Perez was back to 0.5s behind Bottas at the chequered flag, but his charge was in vain. Ahead, his team-mate had won by 35.7s, then earned a rebuke from Masi for doing a burnout on the main straight just after he crossed the finish line, which the race director said, “would not be tolerated in the future”. Verstappen’s celebrations had been done with Latifi accelerating onto the pit straight, six years after the Canadian had smashed into the back of a near-stationary Roberto Merhi, just after the conclusion of the first Formula Renault 3.5 series race at the Red Bull Ring that year.

Bottas’s presence in the post-race press conference gave him the chance to offer a theory on why the Black Arrows couldn’t match Red Bull last Sunday: “If we want to keep up with them, we can’t do as much tyre management.”

And this was the crux of Mercedes’ defeat. Not only did Red Bull clearly have the faster car over a single lap and on race pace last weekend, but it also did the latter while displaying superior levels of tyre wear.

The opposite had been a key factor in Hamilton beating Verstappen at Barcelona, where the Red Bull’s rears were wearing out at a faster rate, which may have left Verstappen vulnerable to an overtake even without the strategy change that ultimately got his rival ahead. At the previous race in France, F1 missed the chance to see if Red Bull had made progress on this matter when it took the aggressive tactic to stop again and set its title contender on a charge.

When discussing the work Red Bull has done to improve its tyre wear since its Spanish defeat, Verstappen said: “It’s all about making sure that you have the tyres to the end. And yeah, I do think in Barcelona we just didn’t have [the best degradation] a bit like it was today [for Mercedes].

“They couldn’t keep up with me in terms of pace and if you have that little bit extra pace you can manage your lap times a bit more. That just helps these tyres a lot to the end because they’re super-sensitive in terms of sliding, locking – whatever. They overheat super-quick, so it’s all about management at the end.”

Hamilton’s theories about Red Bull’s superior pace centre on its rear wing and engine, which Horner says is benefiting from “new oil”. But the world champion explained Mercedes could not “put a smaller wing on this weekend” as “we would have just been slower through the corners and therefore probably had [even] more degradation”.

Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing RB16B, leads Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes W12

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

But a set-up decision Shovlin calls “fairly wacky” may have made the difference in the crucial considerations of tyre management, which resulted in Mercedes’ fourth consecutive defeat – something that has not happened since the start of the turbo hybrid era.

“[It was] a radical approach, which I think was maybe a bit better on a single lap,” he added. “The question that remains is whether we’ve hurt our degradation. Essentially, the window that we work in was much wider. We were sort of going further than we’ve ever gone and just really understanding the effects of that [afterwards].”

“Red Bull clearly had the quicker package this weekend. And we didn't have the pace to apply strategic pressure to Max who could have covered every move we made; he simply controlled the race from the front” Toto Wolff

By being faster and kinder on the tyres, Verstappen’s winning combination simply removed any chance Mercedes had to get Hamilton on terms.

“Red Bull clearly had the quicker package this weekend,” summarised Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff. “And we didn't have the pace to apply strategic pressure to Max who could have covered every move we made; he simply controlled the race from the front.”

“It was our strongest and most complete performance so far this year,” added Horner. “To have won the last four races across the types of circuits that we have is the best run we've had since 2013.

F1 returning to Red Bull’s home ground this weekend after Verstappen produced such a thumping win should worry Mercedes. The last repeat event F1 held on an identical layout was the 70th Anniversary GP at Silverstone last August, which Red Bull won. That event was notable because Pirelli made its compound range a step softer following the British GP, which Mercedes had dominated before the late tyre drama, something Pirelli will do again for the Austrian GP.

Now it’s Red Bull commandingly leading the way, displaying superior pace, and having the edge on tyres with its lead car. But it’s also displaying other characteristics that serve its rival so well. “Of course it looks amazing, we won with a big margin,” concluded Verstappen. “But it’s never good enough.”

Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing, 1st position, arrives in Parc Ferme

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images