Mercedes at its most vulnerable

A Mercedes driver has qualified on pole position for 25 of the last 26 races in Formula 1, and the last 18 grands prix consecutively.

That's just six short of the record, set by Williams-Renault between the French Grand Prix of 1992 and the Japanese GP of '93.

It's an ominous position of power among the current competitive order, but nevertheless nothing as yet that hasn't been seen before in F1.

The last time neither reigning world champion Lewis Hamilton nor his Mercedes team-mate Nico Rosberg started on pole for an F1 race was in Austria 12 months ago.

Then, Felipe Massa managed to score a surprise 16th pole position of his career, leading a Williams one-two from team-mate Valtteri Bottas.

Mercedes is shooting at a pole streak record set by Williams © LAT

Ultimately, Massa was unable to convert that advantage into victory, but it set up one of last season's best races, as the Mercedes drivers were forced to fight back and reassert their authority against a team that admitted afterwards that it wasn't really ready or able to win that race.

The significance of Massa's achievement in relation to this season is that he really shouldn't have been on pole last year. Hamilton's three best sector times around the 2.688-mile Red Bull Ring were actually good enough to earn him the top spot by over a tenth of a second, but the world champion in waiting had one fast lap scrubbed for exceeding track limits in Q3 - after an oversteer moment at Turn 8 - and then spun under braking for Turn 2 on his second run in Q3.

That meant he ended up mired down in ninth place. Meanwhile, Rosberg was narrowly second fastest to Bottas after the banker runs in Q3, but had to abort his second attempt after encountering yellow flags put out for Hamilton's spin. The result: third on the grid in a car capable of being on pole.

The point here is that hooking together a clean and fast lap around this circuit is extremely difficult, even for those with the fastest car at their disposal. In terms of qualifying, this venue potentially puts Mercedes at its most vulnerable to a threat from behind.

For this year, replace Williams with Ferrari. The Scuderia has recently introduced an updated engine into its much-improved 2015 challenger, but executed a scruffy weekend last time out in Canada, which gave Mercedes an easier ride than it should have otherwise enjoyed.

Ferrari endured some gearbox problems on Sebastian Vettel's car in Friday practice here - limiting him to just 32 laps of running - but the four-time world champion still ended the day fastest of all, because he was the only one of the frontrunners to string a lap together on the super-soft tyre before the gremlins struck.

Williams capitalised on others' errors and filled the front row last year © LAT

Many drivers were struggling with the combination of a smooth track surface, cool conditions and relatively hard tyres.

When you add in the fact the circuit is short, and doesn't feature any long-duration high-speed bends, generating critical tyre temperature becomes difficult, which can lead to mistakes.

Vettel's Ferrari team-mate Kimi Raikkonen ran wide between the final two turns on one of his super-soft flying laps, and also flat-spotted his right-front tyre with a massive lockup at Turn 1, while Rosberg and Hamilton also made errors.

Rosberg was still clean enough to bag second fastest time overall (by just 0.011s) but Hamilton wound up only fifth.

If Raikkonen and both Mercedes drivers had strung it all together, Vettel would have actually been slowest among this quartet:

ABSOLUTE BEST SECTORS IN FP2

Driver     S1       S2       S3
Vettel     17.160s  30.697s  21.743s
Rosberg    17.054s  31.021s  21.496s
Raikkonen  17.225s  30.646s  21.668s
Hamilton   17.089s  30.677s  21.693s

If each driver had put these sectors together, Pastor Maldonado's Lotus would have finished up a distant fifth, rather than a close fourth, while fifth-placed Hamilton would have been fastest of all.

BEST SECTOR TIMES COMBINED

 1. Hamilton   1m09.459s
 2. Raikkonen  1m09.539s
 3. Rosberg    1m09.571s
 4. Vettel     1m09.600s

Overall, Mercedes is still 0.247s faster than Ferrari on this circuit right now, once you combine the best sectors of the two drivers in each car. But even when you piece together all the best bits of driving between the four, the gap between Hamilton (first) and Vettel (fourth) is just 0.141s.

Bearing in mind the usual caveats regarding fuel loads and engine settings, there is a very real chance for Ferrari to put itself in the hunt for pole position here. The SF15-T is still not as fast as the W06 it seems, but it is quick enough to take advantage of the slightest slip-up or misfortune in qualifying.

Hamilton had a mistake-filled Friday © XPB

Given that Ferrari has usually been stronger over a race stint than it has in qualifying this year, stealing pole position would represent a realistic shot at a first win since that shock Vettel victory in Malaysia in March.

Both Ferrari and Mercedes split their long-run programmes on Friday, but Vettel's gearbox problems and Raikkonen's flat-spot mean we don't have a representative run to compare to Hamilton's work on the super-soft tyre.

However, Rosberg and Raikkonen both did similar stints on the harder tyre, and when these are compared over a 17-lap run (and adjusted for anomalous slow laps) Raikkonen's average laptime is faster by 0.140s.

Raikkonen completed a 23-lap run on his set of tyres, and was faster on his final flying lap than he was on his first.

Hamilton's shorter (15-lap) run on super-softs was not consistent and thus not particularly useful to analyse, but Massa managed 25 laps on his set of super-softs at a consistent pace, suggesting degradation will again be minimal here.

Track conditions have tended to be a bit too cool for this rubber since it was first used in Monaco in May, and that trend continued in Austria on Friday.

Pirelli reckons there is a 0.7s-1s gap in performance between the two compounds, but the tyres are holding up so well that nothing but a one-stop strategy is likely to be the norm on Sunday.

If that's the case, then securing pole position will be crucial, because there won't likely be opportunities to overtake using a tyre-life advantage or clever strategy.

So far this season the best a Ferrari has managed is to qualify second to Hamilton, but usually this year the SF15-T is just fast enough in race trim to win on merit, provided it can somehow gain the critical advantage of track position by qualifying on pole and leading the race away.

Williams proved last year that it's possible to provoke an upset on this circuit if you do your job correctly. Ferrari is quick enough to do the exact same thing again this year, and arguably in a stronger position to convert should it manage an anniversary dismantling of Mercedes' year-long pole run.

WHAT OF THE REST?

Maldonado was the only non-Mercedes or Ferrari driver to break the 1m10s barrier in practice two, again showing that the Lotus E23 is decent over a single lap on these tyres in cool conditions.

Maldonado was rapid for Lotus © LAT

But Williams (only 14th and 15th fastest overall with Massa and Bottas) will turn its engines up for qualifying, and its long-run pace looks better than Lotus's, so an upset appears unlikely.

The Mercedes-engined customer teams were naturally very competitive on the relatively simple layout of Canada's Circuit de Gilles Villeneuve last time out, and that trend should continue given the design of the Red Bull Ring and conditions are similar, and the tyre compounds identical, so expect another strong performance from the improved Force India VJM08.

That should take care of the top-10 positions, all things running as expected. The challenge for the Renault-powered Red Bull and Toro Rosso teams will be to utilise their medium and high-speed cornering strengths in Turns 5-8 to mitigate for their ongoing power disadvantage.

They are lower-end Q3 contenders again it seems, unless others drop the ball, which on this circuit is eminently possible.

The less said about McLaren-Honda the better, really. Fernando Alonso ran an updated, short-nosed aerodynamic package in second practice, but he had to cut his running short as a precaution when a spark plug failure stopped team-mate Jenson Button's car.

Honda is running at what AUTOSPORT understands is 'Melbourne levels' of power in order to further protect its engines here, following the reliability disaster of Montreal last time out.

It seems McLaren will face an uphill struggle to outperform even the stagnant Sauber cars this weekend, which would mean a return to exiting qualifying at the first hurdle, rather than pushing on towards the top 10.

Troubled times for the Woking/Sakura alliance.