NORRIS STARS AS VERSTAPPEN MAKES IT LOOK EASY
There was a very good race behind Max Verstappen, the dominant winner for the second week in a row at the Red Bull Ring – this time for the Austrian Grand Prix. He was so crushingly in command that it evoked memories of Lewis Hamilton’s victories in Hungary and Spain last year, which serves to highlight how far the formbook has swung in Red Bull’s favour this season.
Verstappen was so good and so far away from his opposition that he may as well have been in a different race. In the fight behind, and briefly in the Dutchman’s orbit, everything really centred on one driver.
Lando Norris nearly upstaged Verstappen in qualifying (see page 19), then quietly threatened him at the start and safety car restart, before actually easing the championship leader’s path to a fifth 2021 win. The seeds for that disruption to Red Bull’s ‘Class A’ rival – Mercedes – were sown in qualifying. Norris’s 0.048-second gap to Verstappen was flattered by the polesitter having to run at the head of the pack at the end of Q3 without a tow, but it critically got the McLaren ahead of both Mercedes on the grid.
“We were the makers of our own issues a bit with the poor qualifying,” assessed Mercedes director of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin. The problem Mercedes faced, Shovlin added, was “that very soft compound, the C5, just wasn’t giving us as much in the hot conditions on Saturday as we were getting from it on Friday”.
Valtteri Bottas, fifth on the grid behind Hamilton, Sergio Perez and the
