The weekend of the Austrian Grand Prix was a fight between Red Bull and Ferrari, where the qualifying session confirmed the equality between both teams in the 2022 season. On Friday afternoon in Spielberg it was only a few thousandths that separated Max Verstappen, Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz, specifically 82 among this leading trio.
In the sprint race, in the early stages, it seemed that the Dutchman enjoyed a slightly faster car, but in the second half of the event, the Prancing Horse , especially in the Monegasque, had more speed thanks to his management of the tires.
Although everything remained the same after the 23 laps of the sprint, that was what gave him the victory at the end of Sunday in Austria, at the home of Red Bull, but with only one free practice session to define his settings, the The teams did not have much time to define how to face all the sessions.
The single lap performance confirmed that everything is very close, and it was this that allowed Ferrari to bring out the design features of the F1-75 to, at least, be more aggressive with the Pirelli tyres . At certain times of the weekend, a single-seater has to know how to resist the energy generated by the compounds, and although they did not suffer from heating problems and in the first laps of the races, they were key in the outcome at the Red Bull Ring.
In the first half of the season, virtually every team complained about the tendency of the cars to understeer due to the new generation of tyres, but at the rear you have to keep in mind that the single-seaters are more nervous on cold compounds. .
This is a phenomenon that is more noticeable in the initial turns, but as the turns go by, the front end reaches the correct operating window, and everything becomes more balanced. If you look at the weekend in Austria, Red Bull capitalized on it in the starts as well as in qualifying, but it was a setback in the main race on Sunday.
Faced with such narrow margins, not even the usual analysis work is easy, and it is that the next races will confirm whether Ferrari will be able to have an advantage on the tires on a constant basis or if it will remain in an isolated episode.
Obviously, there is the variable of the track, as well as the Pirelli kit chosen for the grand prix and the temperatures, but the RB18 is also a factor to take into account, since in Milton Keynes they will evolve to find what the world championship gives them. .
The Italians, for their part, could see that they had a better pace, both with medium and hard, but at the Austrian Grand Prix, it was the C4 and the C3 that were on track, two very similar games in terms of behavior and durability.
The two compounds will also be chosen for the next rounds of France and Hungary, but they will be the soft and the medium, so in the race it is most likely that one of them will be the starting tire and then they will go to C2 .
In the weekend of Paul Ricard it will be interesting to evaluate the long runs on Friday to reaffirm what happened at the Red Bull Ring. “It will be interesting to see what happens at the next two circuits,” said Red Bull boss Christian Horner , before admitting that “at Spielberg, Ferrari was better in terms of degradation.”
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