Is this the resumption of regular service?
Andrea Kimi Antonelli, winner of five of the seven grands prix to date and leader of the world championship, blitzed Friday practice at the Austrian Grand Prix.
His final margin was 0.237 seconds over Oscar Piastri, which is deceptively large around one of Formula 1’s shortest circuits.
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Expressed as a percentage difference to account for the sub-70-second lap, that’s roughly the same advantage Mercedes had over McLaren in Spain and is only just under its season-average margin to the reigning constructors champion.
“It’s been a clean and productive day for us,” Antonelli enthused. “From FP1 onwards, I’ve felt comfortable in the car, which gave us a good platform to work from as we built through the sessions.”
George Russell, though, couldn’t be quite as optimistic.
Russell seemed unable to access much of his Mercedes’s performance. The pre-season title favourite seemed to lack confidence through the corners, especially in the middle of the lap and the tricky downhill turn six and seven, where a 0.3-second difference exploded into more than half a second.
The final two corners confirmed a 0.623-second deficit.
The Briton proffered no real explanation for the difference, but deputy team boss Bradley Lord suggested it was just a matter of honing the set-up.
“I think just trying to get the balance right, basically, and tuning that,” he said. “It felt a little bit oversteery in the low-speed, and a little bit too understeery in the high-speed.
“Some work to do, but the long runs look strong, and we know George historically has been strong here, so I’m sure he’ll be right there and on the pace come tomorrow.”
Russell looked relatively competitive during his race simulation, but he suggested that might not be worth much if he can’t qualify well.
“Straight out of the blocks in FP2 McLaren was flying,” he said. “It was a real surprise just seeing the first lap of the McLarens in FP2, right at the top, and their race pace, especially on Lando’s side, looked a bit better than us.”
Despite the gap in single-lap pace between Mercedes and McLaren, Russell’s commentary isn’t all deflection.
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McLAREN IS CLOSER THAN IT LOOKS
Oscar Piastri had a clean day of running through practice and was Mercedes’s closest challenger in both sessions. The first laps on soft tyres in FP2 were particularly heartening, with Piastri shaking out just 0.042 seconds slower than Antonelli, but then the Italian completed a blistering second lap on used rubber to extend that margin to almost a quarter of a second.
Most assumed the soft tyre will be a single-lap compound given the sizzling track temperatures.
With Norris only 0.088 seconds further back, McLaren appeared to max out its performance.
“I think for Kimi to do that kind of time on his second lap on the softs is quite impressive,” Piastri said.
“I think we’re a step behind Mercedes, or at least Kimi, which we expected.
“We can’t invent anything overnight, but there’s definitely going to be areas for both of us [Piastri and Norris] to learn from each other, so we’ll just try to apply those bits and see where we end up.”
But the telemetry makes some interesting suggestions.
Piastri seems to be losing all his time down the straights, where his Mercedes engine appears unable to compete with Antonelli’s identical Mercedes engine.
Antonelli is reliably 4 kilometres per hour quicker when he and Piastri max out down the first two long straights, and the disparity between energy management is apparent on every straight-line section of the track.
While the engines are the same, teams can run their own energy maps. McLaren got one over Mercedes in the sprint in Miami, for example, by finding a more effective energy management regime to claim a comfortable one-two finish. Mercedes followed McLaren down that path to win the grand prix the next day.
There would appear to be time to find purely through software this weekend.
However, there are a couple of caveats.
The first is that McLaren is a draggier car. We can see that when both cars run it runs out of electrical energy first and then decelerates faster, suggesting the aerodynamics are putting more strain on the engine.
Downforce levels can be tweaked overnight to reduce drag, though that would obviously affect overall performance too.
The second is both Mercedes drivers have brand-new engines, which will come with an inherent power advantage that can’t be worked around.
The signs are reasonable that McLaren is within striking distance at a track it’s typically enjoyed.
But there is a third potentially crucial caveat to all of this — especially for Norris.
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ONLY ONE McLAREN HAS THE MERCEDES RELIABILITY FIX
At Mercedes, the gap between races was spent mostly concerned about engine unreliability, which has cost the works team considerable points, along with customer McLaren, so far this season.
The team confirmed ahead of the weekend that it would be bringing what it hoped would be the solution to Austria: a new battery pack, the key component linking most the engine’s various failures this season.
It’s a timely update too. The Red Bull Ring is in the grips of the European heatwave, with forecast temperatures of 33°C expected at the alpine circuit on Sunday, which is resulting in track temperature in excess of a punishing 50°C.
Exacerbated by the thinner air at altitude, heat and cooling have always been complications in Austria, and Mercedes believes heat might have played a role in its unreliability, even if not decisively.
“It’s true that a component suddenly experienced a sharp temperature spike, which caused the battery to glitch, but in Canada the conditions were completely different, much cooler,” he said, per Autosport.
This weekend could be a key test of the new battery — but not every Mercedes-powered driver will get the new part.
Both Mercedes drivers received the upgrade, but only Oscar Piastri at McLaren and both Alpine drivers.
Lando Norris is missing out on the new part because he’s already used his maximum of three batteries allowed for the season, which means taking a new one would have resulted in a grid drop.
The reigning champion will likely take the hit later in the season at a track deemed more suitable for overtaking. Spa-Francorchamps, two rounds from now, has typically been a favourite for pre-planned engine penalties.
Piastri had used only one battery before now; the new part is his second of three for the season.
Neither Williams driver took the new battery on Friday contrary to expectations. Though Alex Albon is already maxed out, like Norris, Carlos Sainz has so far used only two of his three batteries.
Sainz did take other hybrid-related parts along with Piastri and the Mercedes and Alpine drivers, though.
With Norris, Albon and to a lesser extent Sainz essentially running old or mostly old power units, reliability is far from guaranteed.
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WHERE’S FERRARI?
The story in the lead-up to Austria was that Ferrari was bringing its first engine upgrade of the year to try to shave down its power deficit to Mercedes. Given its chassis was good enough to win in Barcelona — where its excellent tyre usage also made the difference — hopes were high the Italian team would be at least competitive in Spielberg.
But then Lewis Hamilton ended up 0.597 seconds off the pace. Charles Leclerc was an even less inspiring 0.841 seconds down.
The gap? Almost all in engine performance.
Hamilton was lacking 5 kilometres per hour on the run up to turn 3 and then a stunning 14 kilometres per hour down to turn 4. There’s a 10-kilometre-per-hour difference into turn 9 too.
The problem for Ferrari — and we’ve seen it all season — is that it isn’t as effective at recovering energy as Mercedes.
This is exposed when there are two straights separated by a single corner — as is the case on either side of turn 3. The car dumps its battery down the first straight but can’t recharge enough to be competitive down the second straight, where it loses heaps of time.
There’s also a query on the car’s small turbocharger, which seems to be giving the car a little boost out of the corners but could be running out of puff at the end of the straights in the thinner atmosphere, exacerbating the problem.
“I don’t think we have a fix though for the straight-line speed, and for that reason I think we’ll struggle this weekend,” Leclerc lamented.
This sort of configuration wasn’t in Spain, where the car was relatively more competitive.
Then again, we haven’t seen this sort of underperformance at many previous tracks. In Canada, for example, where the hairpin separates two longs straights, the Ferrari engine was far more competitive.
It suggests there’s almost certainly more to come on Saturday with some finetuning.
That’s especially the case given both drivers noted they didn’t feel as comfortable as they’d hoped through the corners, which Leclerc described as a “negative surprise” given the team’s usually competitive chassis.
“We struggled a little bit with the conditions, a bit extreme — the altitude, the temperature,” Ferrari principal Frédéric Vasseur said. “It’s the same for everybody, but it’s not fitting very well to us.”
Certainly Ferrari optimism has taken a bit of a hit, but it would be surprising if this were the true competitive picture.
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RED BULL UPGRADES MASK NEW-CAR OPTIMISM
Red Bull Racing brought a massive upgrade to Austria — so large that team boss Laurent Mekies said its season would “depend a lot on how this package works”.
Max Verstappen was 0.55 seconds off the pace in fourth, while Isack Hadjar was 0.744 second adrift in seventh, both having suffered some disruptive teething problems throughout the day.
“It is what you expect when you change the car so much,” technical director Pierre Waché said.
The upgrade declaration is only ever indicative — not everything has to be declared — but Red Bull Racing named seven significant new parts, from the sidepod inlets, engine cover floor and floor boards to the rear suspension, rear wing and exhaust.
Verstappen stopped in the middle of pit lane attempting to leave his garage in FP1, reporting the car constantly engaging anti-stall. It took the team 20 minutes to fix the car before sending it back out, after which the Dutchman complained the car was shaking under braking and offering him little feeling.
Hadjar missed the first half-hour with a technical problem and reported back that the balance of the car was unpredictable.
Things were a little smoother in FP2, though both drivers found they were struggling with engine mapping that was leaving them bogged down at turn 3, where a lack of grip send Hadjar off the track.
“We tried to understand the car, tried to understand the new package to see how it is,” Waché said. “We modified some stuff on set-up for FP2 — maybe some were in the right direction, some not — then we tried to analyse that after FP2.
“Clearly we have some work to do. When you change the car a lot like that, there is a lot to learn.”
But he was optimistic that, given Verstappen ended the day near the top of the order, Red Bull Racing could be in the fight.
“As a full package, it looks [like it is] delivering what we expect,” he said.
“We are quite happy with what we have.
The potential is there, I think, and we have a good path to quali, I hope.”