Verstappen’s historic hat-trick
French GP
Styrian GP
Austrian GP
THIS TRIPLE HEADER CREATED AN historic first: Max Verstappen became the first man in F1 championship history to win grands prix on three consecutive weekends. In doing so, he left Red Bull’s home track 32 points clear of Lewis Hamilton.
The Red Bull and Mercedes were quite evenly matched at Paul Ricard, but if Mercedes was expecting a repetition of Barcelona – the last ‘conventional’ track after the oddities of Monaco and Baku – where it had comfortably beaten Red Bull through better tyre usage, it was to be sorely disappointed. The two Austrian races which followed painted an exciting picture for Red Bull, Verstappen and Honda, one of complete domination.
Red Bull continues to pile development on its car, Mercedes has essentially switched it off. These three races were where the impact of that started to become very apparent.
Barring a few development parts still in manufacture, the Mercedes W12’s spec is essentially frozen and the Brackley wind tunnel is now devoted entirely to the new regulations car of 2022. It’s only partly about prioritising the future over the present; everything Mercedes was seeing prior to the switch was saying there just wasn’t much in the way of development potential left in the car. It had plateaued. Under the 2021 regulations, the low-rake car just didn’t have
