Formula 1 rolls into Spielberg with a title race that looks very different to the one ahead of Barcelona just a fortnight ago.
Mercedes‘ Kimi Antonelli still leads the drivers’ championship with 156 points, but Lewis Hamilton‘s maiden win for Ferrari, paired with the Italian’s retirement, has put a serious dent in what had looked like a very comfortable advantage.
The Red Bull Ring weekend will add tons of intrigue to the narrative, as Ferrari might introduce engine upgrades, Red Bull will bring a major update, and Mercedes tries to re-establish itself at the top after being overshadowed in Spain.
Talk about Max Verstappen‘s future will add another consequential story to the weekend as the Dutchman seeks to return to the front in Red Bull’s home race.
The outcome of Red Bull’s major upgrade makes the weekend look like a referendum more than a home celebration.
What to watch out for: Verstappen’s future back in the spotlight
It’s that time of the year again
Red Bull
Probably no driver arrives at the Red Bull Ring with more riding on the race than Max Verstappen, and not just because of the orange-clad sea of fans who make the pilgrimage to Spielberg every summer to watch their hero race.
Verstappen’s 2026 has so far been a story of diminished returns. Red Bull or Verstappen specifically won six consecutive Austrian Grands Prix between 2018 and 2023, but this is a different team entering this one.
Verstappen openly admitted after Barcelona that Red Bull currently feels like the “fourth team” on the grid, with the RB22 having started the season 12kg over the minimum weight limit.
He sits seventh in the standings on 55 points, a long way removed from title thoughts, let alone contention.
That matters more than usual this weekend because of what sits in the small print of his agreement.
Verstappen is under contract with Red Bull until the end of 2028, but his deal is believed to contain a clause allowing him to leave if he is lower than second in the championship at the time of the summer break.
With the four-time champion currently outside the top two and the summer shutdown fast approaching, Austria is a bit of a deadline, as the competitiveness — or lack of — of his car feeds directly into a decision that could reshape the driver market for 2027.
Red Bull is bringing a major upgrade package to Spielberg, specifically designed to shed the RB22’s final kilograms of excess weight.
It’s a high-stakes gamble dressed up as a routine development step: if the upgrade delivers at a circuit that has historically rewarded exactly the kind of low-speed traction and direction-change Red Bull is engineered around, Verstappen’s home soil could be the platform for a genuine return to form.
If it doesn’t, the conversations about his future will only get louder.
There’s a reason to believe in the optimistic version in a season where teams are taking turns to introduce big upgrades.
The Red Bull Ring’s heavy braking zones and elevation changes have traditionally suited Verstappen’s aggressive driving style, and the car will be significantly lighter than it was in Barcelona.
Team boss Laurent Mekies is not expecting miracles, however, and he admitted in Spain that Red Bull will need more than just a big upgrade to catch the leaders.
A strong weekend may buy the team some patience from Verstappen.
A flat one is likely to add fuel to the questions about his future that refuse to go away.
Leclerc hasn’t scored any points in the last two races
Grand Prix Photo
There was a time, not so long ago, when Charles Leclerc signing a new long-term Ferrari deal would have been treated as confirmation that the team’s future would be led by him.
Instead, the timing has proven cruelly ironic.
The ink was barely dry before Leclerc endured back-to-back weekends that have left him looking like Ferrari’s number-two driver, something that hasn’t happened very often during his time at Maranello.
Monaco should have been the high point of his year. Pole pace was there in qualifying, and a home podium was within reach until he clipped the barrier at the final corner with a handful of laps to go, forcing him to watch the restart from the pits.
A fortnight later in Barcelona, the pattern repeated itself in even starker terms: a Q3 crash dumped him down to 10th on the grid, and although he clawed his way back to sixth, a late hydraulic failure pitched him into the gravel and out of the race altogether just as Hamilton drove to his first win for the team.
None of this is to say Leclerc, who has been struggling with his brakes, has been bad.
The pace has mostly been there, and both incidents have elements of misfortune attached. But Formula 1 is rarely forgiving of context.
What the run of results has done is hand Hamilton the psychological upper hand at exactly the moment Ferrari‘s hierarchy might have expected the opposite.
Hamilton has looked serene, patient, and increasingly at home in the car; Leclerc has looked like a driver pressing just a fraction too hard to make things happen.
His switch to Carbon Industrie brakes for Barcelona appeared to help the Monegasque make progress, although his qualifying mistake meant his race was compromised from the start.
His new contract was, among other things, meant to settle the question of who will be the pillar of Ferrari’s next era. Instead, it has added uncertainty, as Hamilton, even at 41, appears to have finally found his stride.
The Red Bull Ring has been kind to Leclerc in the past: his five podium finishes are more than he has managed anywhere else, including his win there back in 2022.
For Leclerc, the assignment in Austria is simple, if not easy: avoid errors, beat his team-mate on merit, and remind Ferrari that he is still the leading driver it has bet its long-term future on.
Long before Spielberg’s rolling hills and grandstands, Austria’s Grand Prix history began somewhere far less glamorous: a military airfield.
The 1964 Austrian Grand Prix at Zeltweg was the first ever world championship round held in the country — though it’s worth noting that a non-championship Formula 1 race had already been held there in 1963, won by Jack Brabham.
The 1964 race ran on a 3.186-kilometre circuit built on an active military airfield in the Styrian region, lined with straw bales instead of barriers.
The track was marked out around the airfield with just four corners, all right-handers except for one 180° hairpin, giving it one of the simplest layouts ever used in a world championship race.
The pits were placed in the middle of the main runway, between the two parallel straights, with only hay bales separating the mechanics from passing cars – as Motor Sport’s Denis Jenkinson reported from the event.
The layout was a rectangular loop running clockwise, with two long parallel runway straights connected by sweeping bends at each end.
Zeltweg Airfield hosted just a single F1 Grand Prix. But, as Matt Bishop recalls, it was certainly a memorable one as it shook the majority of the field to death, yet rewarded a racing legend with his only F1 win
By
Matt Bishop
It was brutal to drive. Concrete-slab joints on the runway sections produced a notoriously rough surface that punished cars and drivers alike, turning the race into a war of attrition.
Of the 20 starters, only nine were classified at the finish.
Into that carnage stepped Lorenzo Bandini.
Starting from seventh on the grid, Ferrari’s clear number two to John Surtees, Bandini nursed his Ferrari 156 through the chaos while rivals like Surtees, Dan Gurney, and Jim Clark all succumbed to mechanical failures.
Bandini inherited the lead on lap 47 after Clark’s retirement.
He went on to win by 6.18 seconds from Richie Ginther’s BRM, with Bob Anderson’s Brabham-Climax a full three laps behind in third.
It would be the only world championship victory of Bandini’s career. He died following a crash at the 1967 Monaco Grand Prix.
Zeltweg never hosted Formula 1 again as a championship venue.
