[Sports] Lewis Hamilton says Max Verstappen is 'walking away with it' after Austrian Grand Prix

[Mr.BaZzAr]

 

Max Verstappen won't say it, but the reality is that he is in pretty much total control of this year's Formula 1 championship battle after victory in Sunday's Austrian Grand Prix.

The Red Bull driver has taken four wins in the past five races and only did not win them all because his left rear tyre exploded when he was leading five laps from the end of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.

Two months ago, after Lewis Hamilton won the Spanish Grand Prix to take the Mercedes driver's third win of the opening four races, Verstappen was 14 points behind the seven-time champion.

Now, with nine races completed, Verstappen leads Hamilton by 32 points. There may well be, as Verstappen keeps reminding everyone, a long way to go - although with the pandemic still in full swing, no one is quite sure exactly how many races there will be this season - but it is looking harder and harder to see a way back for Hamilton from this.

As Hamilton put it himself on Sunday: "Max is walking away with it right now and there is not really much we can do about it."

Austrian Grand Prix race report
Full race results
Who is title favourite according to Fernando Alonso
Verstappen's long-term focus
Verstappen's second win within a week at the Red Bull Ring was pretty much a carbon copy of the first. He was the fastest man all weekend, he took pole, and he serenely drove away into a race of his own from the moment the lights went out.

It is not completely clear how much of a challenge Hamilton might have been able to mount, because the world champion started only fourth and took 20 laps to find a way by Lando Norris' McLaren on a stellar weekend for the 21-year-old Briton.

By the time he had, Verstappen was long gone and continued to pull away. No-one at Mercedes seriously thought they had a chance against Verstappen on Sunday.

Hamilton should have finished second, but when a piece of aerodynamically critical bodywork fell off the rear of his car as he went over the kerbs on the exit of Turn 10 in the normal manner at about lap 29, he lost more than 0.5 seconds-worth of performance a lap.

Mercedes hoped they might be able to use his team-mate Valtteri Bottas to protect Hamilton from Norris, but when it became clear that was not going to be possible because of Hamilton's lack of pace - and rapidly deteriorating tyres - they swapped their cars, and Hamilton fell behind Norris as well to finish fourth.

The weekend had gone so smoothly for Verstappen - who was serenaded on his way to victory by a crowd of 60,000 that seemed to be almost entirely composed of orange-clad fans from his home country - that he could barely believe it.

"When you go into the weekend, everyone sees you as the favourite," he said, "but it's never easy to always deliver what we did today. So a great effort by the whole team. The whole package over these two weeks here has been incredible."

And on the championship fight, he just keeps coming back to the same old mantra.

"I am enjoying it but I am very focused on the rest of the season," Verstappen said. "It is still so long and there are still a lot of points you need to score. We need to make sure we are back up there every weekend and use the whole potential of the car. We were very dominant in Austria but we have to make sure we are there again in Silverstone."

Report
A lot rests on Silverstone
The raw statistics of the past few races look bleak for Mercedes, but there is some light in the clouds. Lest we forget, Hamilton would have won in France two weeks ago but for a team strategic error, and next up is the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, which at least in historical terms is very much a Mercedes circuit.

Mercedes engineers believe that some of the explanation for their relatively poor performance in Austria is track specific, and that the nature of Silverstone should swing the performance back towards them.

At the same time, though, there is no doubting Red Bull have made a significant step forward with their car in recent races, with developments to the floor, diffuser, front wing, nose and barge boards, and Mercedes have brought none.

There will be some Mercedes upgrades at Silverstone, although Bottas said he thought they might be the last ones. A lot is hanging on them. Will they, and the track, be enough to allow Mercedes to take Red Bull on once more? And what about the races after that?

"They have added so much performance," Hamilton said, "and we have a lot of work to do to try and close that gap.

"I hope our car feels better [at Silverstone]. It has been pretty poor here the last two weeks - it has definitely been a painful few races. But we will keep our heads up and keep trying.

"We will work as much as we can to improve in the next couple of weeks. We have been massively down at this track. It will be interesting to see how it is in the other races to go."

Team boss Toto Wolff, meanwhile, was spinning the positives.

"I am always a sceptical person, half-empty glass, but I am seeing the