There are few circuits as picturesque as the Red Bull Ring, nestled among the Spielberg slopes in central Austria, just northwest of Graz.
The fast 4.3-kilometre blast kicks off perhaps the most important phase of the Formula 1 season.
The European leg of the campaign is somewhat ill-defined given trips to Miami and Montreal disrupt the continental flow. The mid-season break then comes all too quickly, leaving a European double-header on the other side before a long tour around the globe to complete the season.
Time spent in F1 heartland ends up boiling down to the next four races leading into the summer shutdown: Austria, Britain, Hungary and Belgium.
It’s when the bulk of the upgrades are brought to the cars and when key decisions are made about throwing more resource at this year’s machines or switching focus to 2024.
Driver movements start to take shape at this time too, making it a crucial phase of the season to build momentum.
It’s also when championships can be won and lost.
Three big European wins were the backbone of Max Verstappen’s first title in 2021, and his five successive victories on the continent last year snuffed out any hope of a Ferrari resurgence.
There’s little chance of anyone overcoming Verstappen for the championship this year, but there’s so much still up for grabs behind him, and the next four races will set the tone for the second half of the season.
WAS FERRARI’S CANADA BUMP JUST A BLIP OR SOMETHING MORE?
The 2022 Austrian Grand Prix is the last race Ferrari won.
Around this time last year the team had managed to stitch together two successive victories, in Britain and then Austria, to put Charles Leclerc 38 points behind Max Verstappen and itself 56 points behind Red Bull Racing.
For a brief moment it looked like enough to stave off a full-scale collapse and perhaps even re-enliven the championship.
Instead it was a final hurrah on the way to a monumental thumping, and the team hasn’t sprayed the winners prosecco since.
As was the case late last year, the SF-23 has terrible race pace thanks largely to debilitating tyre wear. This, along with chronic unreliability from stint to stint and even corner to corner, has returned a single grand prix podium for the year to date.
On paper the Red Bull Ring should be another difficult race given its propensity to overheat the tyres.
But there is a tiny glimmer of hope.
Despite its massive qualifying flop, Ferrari enjoyed a competitive weekend in Canada. It was one of the few teams to manage a competitive one-stop strategy — and it started both cars on the more delicate medium tyre to get there — and both cars finished ahead of Sergio Pérez.
“Where we were really, really struggling the beginning of the season was consistency,” Leclerc told Sky Sports.
“It seems that I went in quite a different direction this weekend in terms of set-up. I felt a bit more at ease and that gave me a bit more consistency on all compounds.
“In any of the compounds we put on, whether it was on the medium or the hard, we were quite competitive.”
You could cynically argue that Ferrari’s biggest problems are in medium and high-speed corners, and there were no such corners in Canada. Therefore the team’s Montreal form wasn’t a massive surprise.
But at the preceding Spanish Grand Prix Ferrari applied a significant upgrade package aimed at addressing its key weaknesses.
It had a difficult weekend in Barcelona, but it’s not unusual for big updates to require time to understand.
This weekend we could get a clearer picture as to whether Ferrari is back on track or still lost in the wilderness.
WILL PÉREZ GET THE QUALI RESET HE NEEDS?
“Basically I want to reset, go again,” Pérez said ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix, acknowledging he was stuck in a form funk.
But instead of recapturing his race-winning speed from earlier in the season, he was again knocked out of Q2 and finished a lacklustre sixth on Sunday.
It was the fourth time this season he hasn’t qualified in the top 10 or finished on the podium — that’s a 50 per cent record for the year.
He’s now just nine points ahead of Fernando Alonso and 24 ahead of Lewis Hamilton, both of whom are in much slower cars. His 69-point deficit to Verstappen is barely worth mentioning; the Dutchman is long gone.
This season has become a salvage job for Pérez, with his pride and, in the longer term, his seat at stake.
The key to turning it all around must come on Saturday — or, in the case of this sprint weekend, Friday and Saturday.
The Mexican’s key weakness for so much of this season has been poor one-lap pace that’s left him with too much to do come race day.
While we might put his Australian qualifying crash down to the car problem that he insists fouled his weekend, his crash in Monaco and poor performances in Spain and Canada are more concerning.
It hasn’t escaped attention that they all came after his deeply demoralising loss to Verstappen in Miami, where the Dutchman started ninth but still easily beat the pole-getting Pérez to victory.
Pérez hasn’t had a clean qualifying lap since. His teammate has scored three straight poles and wins.
Only Pérez knows how much of his recent struggles stem from the mental pressure of having Verstappen as a teammate.
Whatever’s behind it, only when he fixes his one-lap weakness will he have any real hope of getting his campaign back under control.
CAN MCLAREN’S UPGRADES MEET THEIR LOFTY AMBITIONS?
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has already described this weekend as a “milestone” for his team, with the first of three major upgrades to be applied to the car.
Indications on Thursday were that the car would be equipped with a new floor, sidepods and engine cover.
Only Lando Norris will use the new package in Austria, with Oscar Piastri missing out. The team had originally planned to introduce the update at the next race in Silverstone but pulled together to get one set ready this weekend. Both drivers will be brought up to equal specification at that race next round.
The sum of these parts, which will stretch across the following British and Hungarian grands prix, are expected to turn the team’s season around and reinsert it into the fight with Alpine for best of the rest.
“We’re excited,” said Piastri. “I’m looking forward to seeing how [the upgrade] performs, and of course we’ve got a stable package on my side of the team, we know exactly what it’s capable of, so we’ll still try to get into the points and do what we can.”
Speaking after the Canadian Grand Prix, Piastri suggested that the team hadn’t given up hope of breaking into the top four before the end of the season.
“That‘s the plan, obviously,” he said, per Autosport. “We’re on our good days probably at the top of the midfield, just, so we need to get out of that midfield and start being able to focus on the top four teams.”
It’s a big leap into the top four, however.
Discounting wet qualifying in Canada, the gap between McLaren and Mercedes, the slowest team among the frontrunners, is 0.596 seconds on average. Ferrari, at the top of the pile, is fully a second quicker.
McLaren has also notably been less competitive in race trim relative to Mercedes and Aston Martin, both of which are stronger race cars than qualifying cars.
But McLaren is hopeful there’s some low-hanging fruit for it to grab now that it’s on a more sustainable development path. And this upgrade package is the sum of pretty much all its development budget for the season to date.
“They just pretty much deliver more downforce with similar characteristics,” Stella said of the new parts. “So we expect a few tenths of a second of lap time improvement.”
Austria has been a friendly track for McLaren in recent history. Lando Norris has picked up two of the teams eight podiums since 2020 in Spielberg, and it’s had both cars finish in the points at every Austrian Grand Prix since 2019.
Its results this weekend won’t define whether the upgrades are a success — particularly after just one practice session on one car — but the round overall should be a decent indicator that it’s moving in the right direction.
WILL THE NEW SPRINT FORMAT DELIVER SECOND TIME OUT?
The first sprint of the season in Azerbaijan saw some last-minute rule tweaks designed to smooth some of the rough edges of the format.
There’s now just one hour of practice for the entire weekend on Friday afternoon, and once qualifying starts on Friday night, parc fermé conditions are in effect, locking in set-up.
Friday qualifying sets the grid for Sunday’s grand prix.
Saturday is now a stand-alone day, with the sprint race getting its own shortened ‘sprint shootout’ qualifying session.
It means Friday qualifying has no bearing on Saturday, and Saturday’s results have no bearing on the Sunday grid.
It’s a better outcome than the previously meaningless Saturday morning practice, but whether the carved-out Saturday sits right with you is a matter of personal opinion.
What’s not up for debate is the amount of jeopardy this piles into the sole practice session.
Just ask Alpine, which suffered its season nadir in Baku.
Pierre Gasly’s car set fire to itself during practice. Not only did he lose track time, but Esteban Ocon was also garaged as a precaution.
Both cars rolled out for qualifying with badly compromised set-ups that meant neither scored points for the weekend. Ocon’s configuration was so bad he chose to start the sprint and the race from pit lane.
Azerbaijan was such a difficult weekend that it precipitated CEO Laurent Rossi’s epic spray against his own team.
Every team wants to avoid a similar fate, but it’ll be made difficult by the weather forecast, which predicts rain on Friday afternoon during the crucial sole practice session.
The risk of rain recedes through the rest of the weekend.
Getting the approach to the format right will also be important given this is the first of two sprint weekends in four races, with another coming up in Belgium at the end of July.
This will be one of the most pressurised Fridays of the year.
HOW CAN I WATCH IT?
The Austrian Grand Prix is live and ad-break free on Kayo and Fox Sports.
First practice starts at 9:30pm (AEST) ahead of qualifying at 1am on Saturday.
The sprint shootout starts at 8pm on Saturday, with the sprint race following at 12:30am Sunday.
Pre-race coverage of the Austrian Grand Prix starts at 9:30pm Sunday before lights out at 11pm.
