Timo Glock on some results of the Austrian Grand Prix

In his column dedicated to the Austrian Grand Prix, former Formula 1 and DTM driver and now Sky Deutschland TV pundit Timo Glock commented on the key events of the ninth stage of the season.

Max Verstappen did everything to make the weekend perfect and he succeeded. At the end of the race, he decided to make one more pit stop, which indicates complete confidence in his abilities, as well as the utmost confidence in the team. He is ready to challenge all rivals, but if something went wrong at this pit stop, he would be under fire.

But all this clearly shows the strength of Red Bull Racing. All divisions of the team work very reliably, pit stops are coordinated and incredibly fast, and Verstappen, as if mocking his rivals, drove the best lap of the race at the end of the distance, not giving any of them the chance to get an extra bonus point . By the way, during the Grand Prix he worked best with rubber.

Team Mercedes rolled back this time after a few good weekends. I can assume this is due to the peculiarities of the Austrian route. On the Red Bull Ring, the front tires work with increased loads, and in general this track was not suitable for Mercedes cars. But the team will draw the necessary conclusions from this.

In Brackley they are preparing the next minor updates to the W14 and will present them at Silverstone, which in theory should have a positive effect on the efficiency of the chassis. But in Austria, Lewis Hamilton and Toto Wolff gave an unequivocal verdict on the car, which was unable to match the pace we saw in Barcelona and Canada last weekend.

“We had a very difficult time, everything turned out even worse than we thought. The car was just slow, besides, if you get fines, it doesn’t help … ”- Wolff gloomily summarized the weekend.

On the other hand, the upgraded McLaren car, on which Lando Norris performed, performed well, although one should be more careful with conclusions. After the race he said in an interview with our TV channel that the car previously performed well on tracks with long zones of intensive braking and fast corners. In addition, we should not forget that Lando loves the Red Bull Ring very much, he has performed well there in recent years and this is one of his favorite circuits.

It will be interesting to see how the MCL60 fares at Silverstone where it will get some more technical updates. But it seems McLaren has closed the gap on Aston Martin, Mercedes and Ferrari a bit, so the team is on the right track.

Nico Hulkenberg again took advantage of all the opportunities that were offered to him and had another great qualifying: on Friday he finished 8th, and in the shootout before the sprint he showed 4th result. He did well in the sprint, finishing 6th, but in Sunday’s race, which was run on a dry track and in warmer weather, he had no chance of staying in the top ten.

In any case, he had to withdraw due to technical problems. Let’s see how far Haas F1 will deal with the shortcomings of their car, which consumes too much rubber at race distance. Niko already admitted that the problem is quite serious and cannot be solved quickly.