Verstappen Breaks Leading Lap Streak
An Austrian ‘23 Grand Prix review
The second sprint race weekend of the season ended in a typical fashion with a few surprises and scuffles along the way.
Max Verstappen (Red Bull) placed first in each session, claiming the fastest lap in Sunday’s race. Austria marked Verstappen’s fourth win at the Red Bull Ring, making him the most decorated driver at the track, yet broke his lap-leading streak that has held strong since Miami.
On lap 25, Charles Leclerc (Ferrari) took the race lead after jumping ahead of Verstappen who was exiting the pit lane. The Dutch driver wasn’t in second for long, swiftly passing Leclerc 10 laps later.
Verstappen inched closer to Sebastian Vettel’s eight consecutive race-win record by securing his fifth this season.
The other half of the Red Bull team had a less fortunate weekend—tainted by a slower performance and track limit penalties. Sergio “Checo” Perez (Red Bull) had a decent weekend according to the standings, qualifying and finishing second in both the sprint shootout and sprint. Perez qualified and finished in third as the checkered flag was raised on Sunday. However, the team’s principal shared his frustrations over Perez’s inability to remain within the white lines.
“He’s got the pace today, he’s got a car that’s easily capable of being on the first or second row, he was matching Max’s [Verstappen] times,” Christian Horner said in an interview with Sky Sports. “Stay in the white lines! It was strike one, strike two, ‘Checo [Perez] just stay in the white lines’, strike three.”
Perez—whose lacking performance compared to Verstappen has sparked replacement rumors—set three fastest lap times in qualifying that were all deleted because he couldn’t stay on track. Nearly sending his teammate and the championship leader into the grass in turn one of the sprint was yet another strike against him on the list that seems to be growing longer each weekend.
However, he was far from the only driver who was slapped with a time penalty for exceeding track limits.
Following the race, Aston Martin protested the results, arguing that the penalties were inconsistently enforced. After an investigation, 1,200 track violations—where all four tires exceeded the confines of the track marked by white lines—were flagged. 130 lap times were deleted during the race.
All of the infringements occurred on the corner between turn nine and 10. At the entry of the tenth corner, a wide right-hander on the left side of the track weaved into a sharp move to the right inside line, hugging the curb. Then, drivers were caught with four tires drifting off the asphalt as they switched back over to the left side. The difficulty of the corner meant each driver took the apex differently, driving the racing line in a unique style.
The protest resulted in 12 additional penalties for eight unlucky drivers, including a 30-second penalty for Alpine’s Esteban Ocon who now holds the most penalties for one driver in a race at four. Six drivers fell in the standings, dropping between one and two places as a result.
Zhou Guanyu (Alfa Romeo) and George Russell (Mercedes) were the only drivers who didn’t cross the white lines.
The second Mercedes driver, Lewis Hamilton, echoed Aston Martin’s complaints about the lack of violation monitoring and became disgruntled about the drivability of the car.
Toto Wolff, the Mercedes team principal, responded by saying “We know the car is bad, please drive it.”
While the gap between Verstappen in first and Leclerc in second was smaller than in previous races as the 71st lap came to a close, the Red Bull driver’s 4-second lead was 24-seconds two laps earlier before he decided to pit last minute for soft tires.
While Verstappen referred to the race as “close” in the cool-down room, even Leclerc acknowledged the futility of pushing the limits of his car. In the end, Verstappen simply has the quicker car.
The desire for a fight is there, however. It’s not just fans who are yawning at the sight of Verstappen’s supremacy, the driver himself wants to close the bridge and battle it out rather than go for a leisurely cruise.
“It was a little bit unfair, the tire advantage I had as well, and the general pace advantage,” Verstappen said. “It would have been better with similar pace, same tires—really fighting for it.”
However, the direction of FIA regulations doesn’t look promising.
“It looks like it’s going to be an ice competition, so whoever has the strongest engine will have a big benefit,” Verstappen said. “I don’t think that should be the intention of F1. For me, it looks pretty terrible.”
Leclerc, who had to push all-out, fell short of pole in qualifying by half a tenth of a second. While Leclerc nearly threw the car off track doing so, Verstappen seemed to hit fastest lap after fastest lap with ease.
Verstappen and Leclerc may have missed a battle, but Carlos Sainz (Ferrari) and Lando Norris (McLaren) drove a race worth celebrating.
After an early pit stop, Sainz swiftly climbed to the top. On lap 17 and 19, he overtook Norris and Hamilton respectively—narrowly avoiding drifting off track because of a forceful Mercedes. Sainz battled Perez nearly the entirety of lap 26, trading places in an aggressive hunt for third. As the order shifted throughout the race, Sainz found himself in a quarrel with Norris and Perez yet again.
The Spanish driver leads Ferrari in the championship standings yet has consistently underperformed compared to Leclerc in past seasons. This season, he has failed to consistently break through into the top three, finishing just shy of a podium in most races. His sixth-place finish adds to his track record but does not feel representative of his competitive drive.
“I’m just frustrated,” Sainz said. “I wish I could maximize it [the car’s pace and points] a bit more because I’m very quick this year, especially in the race.”
Sainz’s former McLaren teammate, Norris, went into the weekend with a host of upgrades—including a side pod entrance and improved side pods, an altered Halo, a new floor and an engine cover.
The advancements had a clear impact. The British driver topped the leaderboard briefly and finished third in the sprint shootout, splitting the Red Bulls up front and both Ferraris behind. While an anti-stall issue caused him to fall back in the sprint race, Norris fought Leclerc for ninth. He had a strong drive on Sunday, gaining an additional place after finishing fifth following the penalty shake-up.
But Norris says there’s still opportunity for improvements.
“I think this has been our best race of the year,” Norris said. “It’s still not great, Fernando [Alonso] was clearly quicker a chunk every lap, and I am almost crashing in every corner. It is just very difficult to drive still.”
His performance, a significant improvement from rounding out the field in last at the beginning of the season, won him Driver of the Day. Norris’ teammate, Oscar Piastri (McLaren), had a rough race, ending up 19th after early contact with another car.
The last lap held excitement throughout the grid as Verstappen went against team orders and made a rash pit stop on lap 69 of 71 to take the fastest lap from his teammate. Russel and Ocon battled until the finish line for P7, with 0.0009 seconds between the two.
As drivers debriefed, their minds weren’t on the race or even Austria. Drivers, fans and team members were thinking of Spa, Belgium, where Dilano van’t Hoff, an 18-year-old Formula Regional driver, died on Saturday. In a similar accident as Anthoine Hubert, a Formula 2 driver who died on the Circuit de Spa-Franscorchamps in 2019, van’t Hoff went off track and was spit back into oncoming traffic after hitting the wall. The other drivers couldn’t see him because of the wet conditions.
“Every time we go through [Eau Rouge] there’s an accident waiting to happen,” Lance Stroll (Aston Martin) said. “Today it happened again and we lost a young kid. We’ve lost two drivers now in the span of four or five years. It’s a really dangerous corner and we say it every year.”
With technological and engineering advances in the motorsport world, it’s common to assume that the fatality of the sport is something of the past. However, weekends like this are a reminder that there is still room to make racing safer.
F1 will race in Spa on Sunday, July 30.
Cover photo courtesy of McLaren’s official Instagram.