Saturday Report: 2023 Austrian GP
Battling drives, allied with bold strategy calls, sees the Team fight back in F1 Sprint
George Russell finished eighth and Lewis Hamilton 10th in today’s F1 Sprint.
Battling performances from both drivers, allied with bold strategy decisions, saw the Team recover from a tough Sprint Shootout to secure a point.
Overnight rain rendered the track damp for the Shootout; in SQ1 lap time deletion followed by traffic on his final lap left Lewis P18. Meanwhile a hydraulics issue ended George’s involvement, forcing him to line up P15 for the F1 Sprint.
Once again, a damp but drying track saw an intermediate start for the Sprint. After positive initial progress in the early stages, and both drivers running on the fringes of the top-10, George and Lewis moved first and boxed for the soft compound tyre.
It proved the correct call as they carved their way back through the midfield utilising the extra grip; George missing out on P7 by just 0.009s, with Lewis improving to P10.
Sprint Shootout
Q1
George Russell | 10 Laps | 1:06.653 | P7 | Soft, Medium |
Lewis Hamilton | 9 Laps | 1:07.282 | P18 | Soft, Soft |
Q2
George Russell | N/A | N/A | P15 | Medium |
Sprint
Driver | Grid | Result | Tyre Strategy |
George Russell | P15 | P8 | Inters, Soft |
Lewis Hamilton | P18 | P10 | Inters, Soft |
George Russell
Conditions today were tricky, so I’m glad we made it from P15 to P8, almost P7. I feel confident driving in these conditions, so all things considered a solid result for us. We’re still far from where we want to be, but I definitely take the positives from today’s sprint. The shootout didn’t really go our way, we were faced with hydraulics issues, which meant we couldn’t run in Q2 and had to start the sprint from the back of the grid. There isn’t much to lose in a sprint race but there’s obviously a high risk of damaging the car in these wet conditions we’ve seen today. Tomorrow should be warmer and drier and I’m confident that we’ll be able to move forward during the race. We had a good car and good pace today so we’ll see what we can achieve on Sunday.
Lewis Hamilton
The car felt relatively quick this morning and I think we could’ve made it to Top 5 in the shootout and the sprint with the pace we had today, but it wasn’t meant to be. Very difficult conditions out there and I didn’t want to gamble so the transition to slicks unfortunately happened one lap too late for me. We tried to just have fun in the race and enjoy ourselves. We lost a few points today so we’ll focus on the race tomorrow, where we will be in a much better place to start from. We’ve also got a lot of learnings today, which we can take into tomorrow.
Toto Wolff, Team Principal & CEO
We had a very unlucky shootout session with Lewis in P18 and George in P15, although both drivers said the car felt better today with the setup changes that happened overnight. The focus for us was then to make up ground during the sprint and the team made a perfect call by putting George on slicks at the right time. We didn’t have anything to lose really at this point, so a brilliant choice by the team to change tyres early. George fought his way back to P8 and finished just thousandths behind Ocon, so our gamble paid off. Lewis was struggling a bit more to get the tyres warmed up, pitting one lap later. But again, this could’ve gone either way. There’s lots we learned today and the car pace looked decent, so we’re looking forward to the race tomorrow.
Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director
The qualifying session this morning was frustrating; the car was in a much better place in the cooler conditions and both drivers were able to set good times. Lewis unfortunately got bumped after his time was deleted due to track limits. George made it through to the second session, but we had a hydraulic issue as we came back into the pits. We need to do better than that as we missed an opportunity to have both cars firmly in the top ten.
Both drivers did a good job in the sprint race today; the conditions were difficult, we knew that we had to take risks on the cross over to gain positions, but ultimately you can’t start a sprint race in 15th and 18th and expect great things. To get into the points with George was a good result, the car seemed to be working well on intermediates and the soft tyres but tomorrow is likely very different, currently it looks dry and hotter so degradation could be a big factor. We’ve not had a great weekend so far, but hopefully we can move forward in the race tomorrow and leave here with a decent result.