Red Bull Ring, Austria– Max Verstappen, the reigning World Champion had hopes of a sixth victory at the Red Bull Ring, but the hopes were ended eight laps before the chequered flag following a tussle with Lando Norris. Meanwhile, Checo had a long and steady race to take seventh place on home turf for Oracle Red Bull Racing.
With Max on pole, he had a good get away and established a comfortable lead ahead of Norris, Russell and Sainz. Checo and Piastri were racing hard for sixth and seventh, with Piastri lunging on Turn 6 making his way past and dropping Checo to seventh place.
Meanwhile, Max maintained his race lead position, with a five-second gap to Norris by the time lap 14 was completed.
Lap 22 saw Checo to be among the first to pit, switching to Hard tyres. With Max making his first stop on lap 24, also switching to Hard tyres, but with a slightly slower, 2.4s pit stop. The pair of McLaren drivers pitted on lap 24 and 26, that when all completed, Max returned to lead 6.7s ahead of Norris and 8.7s ahead of Russell in third place.
Checo’s first stop was then further impeded as he picked up a five-second penalty for speeding in the pit lane during the stop.
By lap 40, Max had stretched out his lead to an eight-second advantage over Norris. All was looking comfortable until the World Champion started to report his Hard tyres felt poor and this was reflected in Norris closing the gap to 6.5s by lap 46.
The gap was further closed as Max’s second pit stop was troublesome, with a six second delay owed to Max’s rear left wheel becoming stuck during the change. After the second round of stops, Norris was only 1.7s off the leading Red Bull.
With both negotiating traffic, Norris was able to haul his way into DRS range of the champion, and on lap 55 the McLaren driver attacked into Turn 3. Max reacted to the move and defended well to hold the lead but three laps later the McLaren driver tried again.
This time, though, Norris’ lunge down the inside resulted in a lock up and he went off track on the outside. Moments earlier the McLaren driver had been shown a black and white flag for track limits and the extra off was then put under investigation by the FIA stewards.
But before the decision of a five-second penalty for track limits was delivered, Norris was on the attack again and on lap 64 the McLaren driver made his fateful move.
With his left rear tyre working itself off the rim Max tried to recover from the collision, limping towards the pits and then sending Norris onto the grass on the right as the McLaren tried to pass. Norris’ rear right tyre then let go. With his destroyed tyre slapping at the rear of his car, Norris was forced to retire from the race, but with a new set of Softs on board Max was sent back out and as the VSC was deployed he emerged in P5.
The dramatic incident handed the lead to Russell, ahead of Piastri who had managed to pass Sainz, with Hamilton in fourth and moment after a flurry of final laps, the Mercedes driver took his second career grand prix win.
Further back, Max held on to fifth behind Hamilton, despite being handed a 10-second penalty for causing the collision with Norris. Nico Hülkenberg took Haas’ best finish of the season so far after managing to keep Checo at bay on the final lap and was left with seventh place ahead of the second Haas of Kevin Magnussen, VCABR’s Daniel Ricciardo and Alpine’s Pierre Gasly who took the final point on offer.
Max Verstappen, commenting on his fifth place finish said, “We were battling today and Lando tried to move around the outside, and then we touched with the rear tyres. It was very hot so immediately we had a puncture. From my side it seemed like a weird move but we obviously need to review this and of course we will talk about it. The shape of the corner also provides these kinds of issues sometimes and it is never nice to come together.
This, however, isn’t currently my main focus as we need to take a look at the overall performance today and the difficulties we had with the car. It was very hard to manage the tyres, the first stint was not too bad and I had a fairly comfortable lead, the second stint was difficult; I think we stayed out a bit too long and then there was the issue with the pit stop. The overall Team performance wasn’t what we expected it to be and the strategy didn’t work that well in this case. It was a shame because of the lead that we had. There are definitely a few things we need to improve looking to next week and hopefully we can work on the performance, tyres and balance.”
In the points, but with a seventh place finish on home turf, Sergio Pérez said, “It is very disappointing to be in this position today. The race started really well and we had a solid start, but then I picked up some damage on Lap 1 and the car struggled and was sliding so it was very difficult to fight towards the front. With the damage, I was off balance and made a mistake going into the pitlane and got a five-second time penalty which hindered us towards the end of the race.
There are a few things that we need to look back at and carefully analyse everything, the race pace was a question mark today as I felt like we did some really good improvements after yesterday. Overall we lacked performance, it was a very difficult race and one that I struggled a lot in. Next weekend I hope we can have a solid, clean showing, and hopefully will be able to sort all of the problems from this weekend to be able to move forwards as there are still a lot of races left. On to Silverstone.”