Austrian GP conclusions: Verstappen vs Norris, Adrian Newey theory, valuable Russell lesson

Conclusions from the 2024 Austrian Grand Prix

Lando Norris vs Max Verstappen: Lando too eager to make a statement?

For the genesis of the collision between Verstappen and Norris in the closing laps in Austria, look no further than the pivotal moment of the sprint race on Saturday morning.

Lando thought he had got Max with a bold, beautifully executed move late on the brakes into Turn 3 on the fifth lap, only to leave the door wide open into the very next braking zone for Verstappen to reclaim the lead in an instant.

And just like that, with a single, silly little misjudgement, the latest in a growing line of potential wins was blown. And Norris knew it.

“I messed up and left the door open like an amateur,” he said straight after alighting from the car.

It was still playing on his mind when he appeared before media including PlanetF1.com hours later in the post-qualifying press conference: “I know what I did wrong, it was obviously very clear.”

It’s a perception that has stalked Norris for quite some time now, the idea that cuddly little Lando jumps out of the way and rolls out the red carpet at the very first sighting of his old buddy Max in his mirrors.

Too much of a pushover. Not aggressive or assertive enough. And – whisper it – possibly even intimidated by Verstappen too.

Close your eyes and you can almost picture Lando angrily muttering those charges while eyeballing himself in the mirror first thing on a grand prix Sunday morning.

Reaction: Lando Norris and Max Verstappen collide in Austria

???? Andrea Stella delivers scathing Max Verstappen criticism and points to Lewis Hamilton incident

???? Lando Norris ‘would lose a lot of respect’ if ‘stupid’ Max Verstappen does not admit fault

The lost sprint win came after weeks of Max winning races with Lando’s name on them: resisting the McLaren to triumph by 0.725 seconds at Imola; pitting at the right time behind the Safety Car to wipe out the eight-second lead Norris had built in Canada; emerging ahead from the first corner after a sensational Norris pole in Barcelona.

That’s been irritating him lately too, as evidenced when said on Thursday how he knows he “gets a lot of crap for being in a good car and not winning a race.”

So when that rarest of things – a slow Red Bull pit stop – helped put him within DRS range of Verstappen with the finish in sight in Austria, did Lando decide this would finally be the day that he would bow no more?

That he would prove – to Max, to the doubters, maybe even to himself – that he can bare his teeth too?

It felt that way as he launched divebomb after divebomb, as Verstappen called them, into the braking zone of Turn 3, each a little more desperate than the last – yet all lacking conviction – as a penalty for excessive track limits breaches began to hover over him.

The bombardment of aggression came close to straying into recklessness before the inevitable collision as Norris went to try the outside instead, potentially catching Max by surprise as he moved to the left in anticipation of dodging Lando’s latest lunge.

There is a fascinating parallel to be made with the collision between the Mercedes team-mates at the same spot in 2016, another driver not exactly renowned for his skill, creativity and decisiveness in wheel-to-wheel combat (Nico Rosberg) making a stand by trying to take on a natural-born racer (Lewis Hamilton) at his own game.

That’s what happens when a typically non-aggressive driver of the nature of Rosberg and Norris – throw in Sergio Perez too – turns to all-out attack.

Often there’s a frantic, hopeful, lungey element to their attempts to overtake compared to the control and calculated risks of a Hamilton or Verstappen, who always seem to impose themselves and dominate the situation in the way an elite boxer might claim the centre of the ring.

He may have lost his front wing in the aftermath but Rosberg did not mind having the collision that day in 2016, viewing it, much like their clash in Barcelona earlier that year, as a marker in his rivalry with Hamilton.

And it may be that, with more battles ahead, this will come to be regarded as similar warning shot from Norris to Verstappen.

Yet, also coming off worse on this day in history, Norris ended up looking for all the world like a driver a little too eager to make a statement.

‘Operation: No More Mr Nice Guy’ backfired.

Max Verstappen to Mercedes? It’s never made more sense

It takes two to tango, of course, yet the fact remains that Norris simply would not have been in a position to pressurise Verstappen without the collector’s item of a slow Red Bull stop.

After their struggles over recent races, this weekend was much more like it for Red Bull, the RB20 not quite back to its old self but able to stretch its legs more at a circuit where half the lap is one big DRS zone.

Yet still he found himself in the same position he’s been in for the last few races, once again hanging on with the finish line in sight, the time loss of his stop exacerbated by a lockup as his recent handling woes resurfaced out of nowhere.

And unlike the sprint, this time Verstappen just could not shake Norris out of his DRS range.

How the landscape has shifted since this race last year, when he even had the luxury of an extra stop for a set of softs for a late assault on the fastest-lap bonus point.

It was a weekend that hit home just how dramatically Red Bull’s world has altered in just 12 months, for just weeks after Helmut Marko claimed that “a truce” had been reached as the team made the conscious decision to prioritise defending their titles, internal tensions were reignited at their home race between Verstappen’s father Jos and Christian Horner.

The root of this latest flashpoint? Something about a historic F1 parade over the race weekend.

That’s right: an actual sideshow. Oh, the irony…

That ongoing tension has seen Verstappen linked lately with a move to Mercedes, a switch that seemed incomprehensible at the start of this year in the afterglow of the most dominant season ever produced by a team and driver in total harmony with each other.

Verstappen was probed over his future in the Thursday press conference, yet his protestations that he will remain where he is for F1 2025 couldn’t have sounded less convincing had he been tied to his chair with a sack over his head.

Even before the team’s second victory of the ground-effect era in Austria, there was a sense that a move to Mercedes is gradually becoming ever more appealing – not necessarily as a result of what Toto Wolff may be able to offer, but of what is currently unfolding at Red Bull.

Can it just be a coincidence, after all, that Red Bull haven’t been the same since Adrian Newey announced he will leave the team next year and ceased immediately his involvement with the F1 operation?

Regardless of whether or not there’s something to that particular theory, there has been an inescapable feeling over recent weeks that Red Bull have lost an intangible something they won’t easily get back, the slow stop – coming after the RB20’s fundamental frailties over bumps and kerbs came to light – the latest on-track manifestation that all is not well.

It has been impossible to hear Verstappen’s remarks on current state of play – his comment in Spain, for instance, that his F1 2023 dominance is now “completely gone” – without placing them in the context of the uncertainty surrounding his future and wondering how this sudden shakiness could influence his thinking.

It is at times like this, too, that you remember Verstappen’s relationship with Red Bull has always been more transactional than that the team enjoyed with its favourite son Sebastian Vettel.

The only reason he became a Red Bull junior in the first place was because Marko and Co. could offer him something – an instant promotion to F1 with Toro Rosso – Mercedes could not.

Ferociously ambitious and results-driven as a matter of principle, it would be so typically Verstappen, so typically Max, if he and Jos sensed the waterfall coming – that Red Bull are weakening, their greatest days if not already over then likely coming to an end – and hopped from one stone to another to ensure the wins and World Championships keep flowing in the years to come.

Add to the loss of Newey the car’s patchy recent form, the nonsense behind the scenes he could so easily live without, as well as the widespread suspicion that Mercedes might just be the place to be for the F1 2026 regulation changes, and it really isn’t as outlandish as it once seemed.

Max to Mercedes? In fact, it’s never made as much sense.

A valuable lesson for George Russell

But whom would Verstappen replace if he does decide to join Mercedes over the next 12 months or so?

If the team are indeed set on Andrea Kimi Antonelli, the boy wonder described as Merc’s answer to Max, most assume it would be Russell, whose current contract is due to expire at the end of next season.

Russell may not have developed quite as hoped since becoming Hamilton’s team-mate two-and-a-half years ago, yet how much of that is related to the team’s competitive situation?

Even with two victories now to his name, it is telling that his best performance for Mercedes came when he was still a Williams driver, his stand-in appearance for an unwell Hamilton at the 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix the one and only time to date that he has had access to a car of title-winning quality.

His performance that night, one of the most impressive F1 feats of this century, is the one the team should be clinging to whenever they pause to assess his ultimate potential.

Having simply gone with the flow in his first season with the team in 2022, driving the car he was given to the limit of its abilities in a season defined by a remarkable consistency, a frustration has bubbled as his Mercedes career has progressed with no discernible improvement in results.

Might that be why he has been guilty of overreaching when rare opportunities to win have presented themselves recently?

Having paced himself poorly in pursuit of the victory at Singapore 2023, losing the life from his tyres before a crash on the final lap, Russell was distraught – convinced he had “let the team down a bit” – after a series of mistakes prevented him from converting pole position in Canada last month.

With a win on the line, he had tried too hard in changeable conditions and became his own worst enemy.

Inheriting the victory in Austria, then, on a day he had already made peace with third place, could prove an immensely valuable lesson for Russell, who spoke revealingly in the press conference of how he decided to concentrate purely on his driving in the closing laps as he sought to maintain a gap to the advancing Piastri.

It seemed a departure from Montreal where, in his utter determination to bring success to Mercedes after such an extended wait, he had three-pointed stars in his eyes.

Drivers can convince themselves something special is required to succeed in F1, that a little extra is needed with each incremental step from competing for points, then podiums, then victories and then finally titles.

Yet sometimes, every so often, a win will fall from the sky and land neatly in your lap.

Moral of the story? Don’t go chasing the result, trust the process instead.

Another podium, but Oscar Piastri’s race pace and tyre management remain a concern

The exact moment McLaren lost the chance to win the sprint race in Austria?

It wasn’t when Norris “left the door open like an amateur” for Verstappen, seconds after stealing the lead with a bold move late on the brakes, but when Piastri emerged from the next series of corners between them.

Bottle, meet cork.

McLaren suddenly found themselves in that undesirable situation of the faster driver being the one behind.

And since a poxy little sprint race is no place for a self-respecting F1 team to jeopardise internal peace with the spectre of team orders, that was how it remained.

Having been given hell until that point of the race, Max was off the hook, soon able to break free from DRS range and establish a lead of more than four seconds by the time the chequered flag fell.

It was a passage to once again bring into focus Piastri’s weakness of race pace, and specifically tyre management, which continues to plague him 18 months into his F1 career.

Indeed, when his final Q3 lap – which would have been good enough for third on the grid – was deleted a few hours later to leave him seventh, there was a school of thought that it wasn’t such a bad thing for McLaren, for the absence of his team-mate from the lead battle would simplify Norris’s task ahead of his rematch with Verstappen. That worked out well…

Piastri is not the first, and won’t be the last, young driver to struggle to master the Pirelli tyres – even a teenage Verstappen needed time to develop a complete understanding of the dos and don’ts – yet few have taken quite so long to get to grips with them.

It surely does not help that the goalposts keep shifting – Hamilton, now in his 18th season, remarked recently that the 2024 Pirellis are the most sensitive tyres he’s ever encountered in F1 – yet could McLaren potentially do more to help him?

This, after all, is a team notorious (just ask Daniel Ricciardo and others) for filling their drivers’ heads full of information without necessarily addressing the root of the problem.

Max? He became fluent in Pirelli during his second F1 pre-season in 2016, when Toro Rosso dedicated a large proportion of their running in Barcelona to bringing Verstappen and Carlos Sainz up to standard.

Two months later, Verstappen was back in Spain and managing his tyres to absolute perfection, holding off World Champions of the calibre of Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen to claim his maiden F1 victory in an unfamiliar Red Bull.

Proof, maybe, that there are ways and means to accelerate the Pirelli-learning process.

There remains a lot to like about Piastri, whose lap to outqualify Norris in Monaco – the scene of his only previous podium of 2024 at a circuit where tyre preservation is non-existent given the slow pace of the race – continued the promising trend of 2023 of beating his established team-mate over a single lap at traditional drivers’ circuits.

And the next series of races at Silverstone, Hungary and Spa – all circuits where he offered the first real glimpses of his vast talent last year – could prove highly productive.

Yet until he fully masters one of the most fundamental skills for a modern F1 driver, Piastri’s ultimate potential will continue to remain frustratingly inaccessible.

Hallelujah! Finally a solution for track limits

Sorry, what’s that you say? Track limits?

Just stick a concrete wall at every corner and be done with it. That’ll learn ’em.

The motor-racing anorak has long taken a hardline stance on track limits, aghast that the same drivers who can thread a car so finely and brilliantly between the walls on the streets of Baku and Monaco allow themselves to become so sloppy at other circuits around the world.

Since it returned to the F1 calendar a decade ago, the Austrian Grand Prix has marked the beginning of track limits season – a confusing, disheartening time of year, which tends to run until at least the Hungarian GP, when the most boring subject in F1 becomes front and centre.

The situation slumped to a nadir at this race in 2023 when F1 went full VAR, resulting in eight drivers being handed post-race penalties after the FIA examined 1,200 instances of potential breaches.

Changing the result long after the fans have headed for home? A sure-fire way to damage a sport’s credibility.

It is why the solution this weekend – placing small strips of gravel on the outside of the two corners, the fast right-handers of Turn 9 and 10 right at the end of the lap, where every single one of those 2023 transgressions took place – was so widely welcomed.

The signs that this could be the way forward originated in China, where a bed of gravel sits on the exit of the last corner and – even better – caught out drivers who got it wrong as Carlos Sainz crashed out of qualifying and Fernando Alonso had to make the save of the century to avoid a similar fate.

Now it has proven to work here too – now we know for sure that truckloads of gravel are not required to keep drivers on the straight and narrow – why not take it everywhere, starting with the track-limits hotspots at Silverstone (Copse and Stowe) and the Hungaroring (Turns 4 and 11)?

Then to the penultimate turn at Austin, to the Sector 2 esses in Mexico, to Descida do Lago at Interlagos and to pretty much every corner of note in Qatar, where gravel can replace those tyre-wrecking kerbs.

Is it perfect? Not quite. Not when some of our pampered grand prix stars complained of what the rally drivers call “pollution”, stones of gravel kicked up by the cars and scattered over the racing line.

But if F1 is to stop short of whacking a great big slabs of concrete all over the world’s racetracks, this is surely the next-best thing.