Luke’s Weekend Take – Austrian GP 2023

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Exciting Upgrades and Qualifying Drama: F1 Round 10 at Red Bull Ring, Austria

Austria 7

We’re back at the Red Bull Ring in Spielberg Austria for Round 10 and the 2nd Sprint Weekend of the 2023 F1 Season and it looks like we have a good weekend ahead of us. We see major upgrades come to the weekend, upsets in qualifying, track limits drama and some interesting weather.

Mclaren this weekend managed to get upgrades for Lando Norris’s car a race earlier while Oscar Piastri is set to get the same upgrades in Silverstone. The upgrades include a new floor and side pods which were inspired by the RB19 design and Mclaren are hoping these upgrades help them fight a bit more for points against Alpine and Williams and potentially go for some podiums for the rest of the season. These upgrades are looking promising as Lando Norris managed to qualify 4th but for most of the session Norris was trading laps with Max Verstappen throughout qualifying, Norris always performs well in the Red Bull Ring so I would not be surprised if he manages to get on the podium on Sunday and in the Sprint Race today.

Ferrari themselves brought some further upgrades to their SF-23 car, a new floor and a new front wing have been introduced to the car which were also inspired by the Red Bull car. The upgrades seem to also be working well for Ferrari as on Friday they were putting in some impressive times on the timing sheets. Both cars managed to be in the top 3 for both FP1 and Qualifying which puts the Scuderia team in a good spot on Sunday. Charles Leclerc in Qualifying managed to qualify on the front row alongside Max Verstappen with only 0.048s separating the two. Let’s just hope that the Ferraris can keep up this pace throughout the race on Sunday, I guess the sprint race today will give us a good insight for what we should expect on Sunday.

To close off the upgrades we see Williams get the same upgrade package Alex Albon got in Canada to Logan Sargeant a race earlier than expected. In FP1 the Williams team were doing some intensive testing on Sargeant’s car as we see them put the high vis paint on the car to try and sort out the setup for Logan however given the short running time the teams got this weekend due to a Sprint Weekend, Sargeant only managed to qualify 18th while his teammate managed a respectable 10th. Let’s hope that today Sargeant can get more used to the car and get a good result in the Sprint Shootout and the Sprint Race ahead of the race tomorrow.

Drama-Filled Qualifying at Canadian GP: Red Flags, Rain, and Surprises Shape the Grid

In FP1 we saw all the teams trying to fit a lot of testing programs in 1 hour given it is a Sprint Weekend and Parc Ferme comes into place on the Friday after the 1 Free Practice session. Most cars started their race program early on when all drivers were out on the white striped hard tyre and Mercedes were showing some decent race on the Hard as Lewis Hamilton was the fastest out of all the drivers on this tyre compound. Towards the end of the session all teams turned their focus to Qualifying sims to prepare for the session later on that day. Carlos Sainz was looking very impressive on the Soft tyres and managed to get the 2nd fastest time as Max Verstappen managed to get the fastest time on the Mediums by 0.242s who was followed by Carlos Sainz, Charles Leclerc, Lewis Hamilton, Sergio Perez, Lance Stroll, Kevin Magnussen, Fernando Alonso, George Russell and Zhou Guanyu to form the top 10 in FP1.

We now head into Qualifying session for Sundays Race and all teams wanted to get on track early to start putting in some times on the board in case there are any incidents on the track, in Q1 we did see Valtteri Bottas spin on the exit of Turn 1 but managed to keep the car out of the barriers. The Red Flag did make an appearance as Bottas seemed to be stationary for a while but moments later he managed to get the car going and get back to the pits and also to get out of Q1. While we see Yuki Tsunoda, Zhou Guanyu, Logan Sargeant, Kevin Magnussen and Nyck De Vries eliminated in Q1. There was only 0.8 seconds separating 1st and 20th in Q1 which was very tight for all the drivers to stay in Q2.

In Q2 is where we see most of the drama as we start seeing the stewards having to work harder and delete lap times for drivers exceeding track limits. Red Bull were struggling a lot with this as we see the 1st run for both Max and Perez deleted for track limits. Max managed to get into the grove and managed to match his deleted time while staying in the limits while Perez couldn’t manage to set a time within track limits which is was led to him being eliminated in Q2 as all 3 of his timed laps were deleted. Red Bull weren’t the only ones struggling though as in total, the stewards deleted 47 laps for track limits. The main culprits were Turns 9 and 10 where drivers kept going outside the white lines with all 4 wheels. In Q2 we see Sergio Perez, Valtteri Bottas, George Russell, Esteban Ocon and Oscar Piastri being eliminated and all of them due to deleted times.

We now head into Q3 where we didn’t see so many drivers penalised for track limits and it was Verstappen with the pace in Q3, unlike past races though he wasn’t too far ahead of the rest as we see the Ferrari of Leclerc take the 2nd spot by 0.048s to Max followed by Carlos Sainz, Lando Norris, Lewis Hamilton, Lance Stroll, Fernando Alonso, Nico Hulkenberg, Pierre Gasly, and Alex Albon form the top 10. This should lead to an interesting race on Sunday and would be interesting to see who will be on the podium. With track limits being so strict on this track I think we will get to see a few 5 second penalties being thrown around.

Who do you think will come out on top in the Sprint Race and the Main Race? I think we are in for a surprise on the weekend as we might see a few different drivers up on the podium.

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