There is more and more margin between the Verstappen-Hamilton duo and the rest of the grid. As always, when there is a very close fight for the championship, the two big players receive maximum support and tend to distance themselves from their team mates as well.
A gap that could widen further in the championship, taking into consideration that the rest of the Formula 1 teams are already focusing on the 2022 season. It will therefore not be surprising if, as long as the championship is alive in terms of title fight, we will have other races with many lapped cars.
In the Styrian Grand Prix, only the first four finished in the same lap as the winner, but we shouldn’t underestimate the fact that Red Bull Ring is the shortest track of the year in terms of time.
Scuderia Ferrari has shown itself in good shape and did not eat the tires as some believe or would have us believed. What is certain is that the Maranello team has lost many, too many points since the start of the season. And this is true also for this weekend of the Styrian Grand Prix.
Despite the clearly poorer qualifying session than usual, the SF21 would have certainly been able to finish further ahead in this race (P5 and P7), certainly in full battle with Norris. The British driver himself confirmed this: “Without the problem Leclerc had, he would have been ahead of us today, or in any case he would have been a great threat”.
Charles Leclerc’s contact with Gasly, avoidable by the Monegasque, is just an episode between bad luck and negligence that is added to others. Unlike the Paul Ricard, Ferrari chose a very loaded setup at Spielberg: a configuration similar in some ways to the one used with the SF90. However, two years ago the Maranello car could amply afford a lot more drag on the straights.
The SF21 is much better than the SF1000 in almost everything, so even in terms of aerodynamic efficiency, although there is still a long way to go, but it still lacks HP as compared to its rivals and to its own 2019 power unit. Nevertheless, the race pace appeared very convincing since Friday when there was still little grip. With increasing grip, things have also improved, no signs of overheating, obviously maintaining the problem of straight-line speed under the same conditions. That is, in qualifying, when all the cars can open the DRS at the same time but in the race it is different. With no trains with open DRSs for many, the SF21 passed pretty smoothly just about every car except Red Bull and Mercedes.
It would have been difficult to pass Lando’s Mclaren but Charles Leclerc, with the race without significant traffic, would have arrived 49 seconds behind Verstappen according to what we calculated. Carlos Sainz, more penalized by the starting position, gained a lot: 6 positions.
Unlike Portimão, Paul Ricard or certain stages in Baku, the SF21 activated the tires correctly in all conditions.
It is quite evident that the problems, which are not easy to solve because they depend on a front which is that of the SF1000, arise when the characteristics of the track favor the protection of the front (front limited) combined with low grip.
We now enter the week of the Austrian GP, which will be raced with softer compounds (the compound for qualifying will be the C5) and with a goal for Ferrari: to try to make progress in qualifying. The work that the drivers and engineers will carry out in the next days will be to understand whether to carry out a comparative test set-up in free practice on Friday, by using the spoon rear wing seen at Paul Ricard, or whether to confirm the macro setup used in this positive weekend.
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