Mark Hughes: The Mercedes & Ferrari errors that gave Verstappen first Honda F1 win

Leclerc burst into an easy lead and began sprinting clean away. The two Mercs were in no position to chase the Ferrari, regardless of tyre compounds. Their limitation was engine temperatures – control electronics and tyres too but mainly engine. These conditions were beyond the design limits of the car – and they couldn’t even begin to contemplate running close behind other cars. So Bottas backed away from Leclerc and Hamilton did the same to Bottas.

At Ferrari they were concentrating on getting their softs to do a decent stint in these hotter-than-forecast temperatures so were not perhaps monitoring just how slowly Mercedes was running. They were taking their cue from Bottas’s pace as to how fast to allow Leclerc to run. It made sense in the moment but in hindsight contributed to them losing this race.

Verstappen meanwhile had dropped down to a disastrous eighth place, behind team-mate Pierre Gasly who had gone around his outside through Turn 3. Verstappen successfully retaliated into 4, but locked up a front tyre in the process. So now he was carrying a flat-spot for all the first stint, and running seventh. What a disaster. Actually, that bogging down off the startline was what was going to win him this race… That and Ferrari’s misreading of how slow Mercedes actually was.

Once he’d quickly got 2.5-3sec over Bottas, Leclerc – with concerns going in about getting the soft tyres to do a long enough stint in this heat – was guided into easing off. He was bursting to be let off the leash, but Ferrari held him firmly on it.

Why Ferrari began on the softs

Ferrari had chosen to run the soft tyre in Q2 – and therefore into the first stint of the race – rather than the apparently safer medium chosen by Mercedes and Verstappen. But there was a sound logic behind that. They’d had the pace to lock out the front row. The superior traction on the softer tyre would pretty much have guaranteed they’d have held those positions into the first turn and established 1-2 track position. This would have enabled the second car to have kept the Mercs and Verstappen off the backs of the leader and thereby not force a tyre-killing pace on the softs. But that plan had gone awry with Sebastian Vettel’s Q3 mechanical problem.

So now, without the buffer of a team-mate, Leclerc had to run long enough on his softs that his second stint wasn’t compromisingly long or – even worse – be forced onto a two-stop. The pre-race Pirelli estimation was a maximum range of 25 laps for the softs, 44 laps for the mediums. Hards then for the second stint to the end. So Ferrari logically figured it just needed to keep Leclerc out of undercut range around the pitstop window and run as gently as possible within that limitation. That was the mindset going in and perhaps that blinkered it to the possibility that this wasn’t going to be the pattern of the race at all.

Covering Mercedes. The trap is set

Ironically, it was Vettel’s pace as the pitstop window opened that played its part in Ferrari’s own downfall. Seb began stepping it up from around the 17th lap – and the Merc drivers had nothing with which to respond. No higher engine modes and they were lifting and coasting to a ridiculous degree to keep the temperatures down – up to 400 metres before the corners. Because they were closely spaced, there was a real danger that Vettel was going to jump them both. Before it was too late, Mercedes decided it would have to act and instructed its lead car (Bottas) to come in at the end of the 21st lap.

Ferrari had just instructed Vettel – at late notice – to do the same. The order from the Ferrari pitwall to the garage went out late. Half the mechanics – those on the radio system of communication – heard it. The other half – those on a cable communication – did not. So two of Vettel’s wheels were not ready as he stopped. He was stationary for over 6sec. Had it not been for that, there’s a good chance that Vettel would actually have jumped Bottas in the pits – for Mercedes had been forced to hold him as Vettel was about to cut across their bows on his way to the adjacent Ferrari pit.

But it was worse than that. Not only did Vettel fail to jump ahead of the Merc, but the Bottas stop pressured Ferrari into bringing Leclerc in to cover him on the very next lap. At the time Leclerc had been running 4.6sec ahead of Bottas, so it actually had time to monitor Bottas’s pace for a lap without putting the position at any real risk. Instead, it played it safe, assumed all it had to do was ensure track positioning over the Mercs – and Leclerc duly exited still 4sec clear of Bottas.

In hindsight, that was a victory-costing error. It was later apparent that had he stayed out, he’d easily have had enough pace on his old tyres to have countered the badly compromised Mercedes. Instead, the earlier-than-necessary stop put Leclerc on a 49-lap second stint against an opponent that wasn’t Mercedes after all, one which it had mistakenly assumed it needn’t worry about: Verstappen.

It could have given Verstappen that mistake and still won it – if only it had allowed Leclerc off the leash in his first stint, as he was constantly urging them to do. That way, he’d have built a bigger cushion to protect him against Verstappen’s later charge. The softs that came off at his pitstop still had loads of life in them, so confirming that the tyre strategy had been absolutely fine. That wasn’t what lost them this race; rather it was in not using their extra performance. But that’s hindsight – and isn’t the way races are run in this software-controlled era where a safety car can always wipe out your hard-earned gap.

There was one more click of fate’s ratchet that sealed Leclerc’s attack by Verstappen: Hamilton’s lap-22 error. Mercedes had instructed Hamilton to stay out after Bottas pitted. His pace on his old mediums was pretty much the same as Bottas’s on his new hards – and there was almost exactly a pitstop’s-worth of gap between them. They didn’t want to bring Hamilton out right on Bottas’s tail – not with the temperatures as they were. They wanted to maximise Hamilton’s time in free air, just to keep the temperatures under better control. This gave Hamilton the opportunity to see if he could pull out enough time on his team-mate to ensure he would overcut him at his pit stop.

So he stopped lifting and coasting for a lap, began actually pushing for the first time – and set the race’s fastest lap to date. But in doing so he ran hard over the final turn kerb, just as he had on Friday morning – with exactly the same front wing-damaging result. A flap cracked, meaning it couldn’t transfer as much force to the wing – and it became steadily worse. He was no longer on course to jump Bottas and was brought in on the 30th lap for a nose and tyre change. Had it not been for that, Verstappen would have had to have found his way past Hamilton before attacking the others – and that could probably have kept the Red Bull off Leclerc’s back just long enough for Ferrari.

Verstappen and Honda. Release the beast

Verstappen had only been able to stay out this long because his near-stall off the line had put him at the back of the lead group – and so he therefore had no undercut pressure from behind. All the others had to compromise their fastest theoretical race time in order to retain – or try to gain – track position. Verstappen’s start line problem meant he had no such concerns.

The crowd roared its approval as Hamilton pitted – because it put Verstappen into a temporary lead. But Red Bull brought him in the very next lap. After a fantastic 1.8sec pit stop, Verstappen rejoined on his fresh hards – tyres that were 10 laps newer than those of his rivals ahead of him. He’d picked up a position thanks to Hamilton’s nose change delay and now had ahead of him Vettel, Bottas and Leclerc. He was 12.9sec adrift of the leader with 39 laps to go. Could he average 0.33sec per lap faster than Leclerc while also passing the two cars in between them? He was up for giving it a try – and so was Honda.

He asked for more power. The reply came back: mode 11. Run it to the end. This was the Honda’s most aggressive mode and it will almost certainly have cost it a lot of engine life. But so what? Honda’s vice-principal was here, the whole fanatical crowd was behind them – and Max was in the mood. Magic was in the hot air.

Leclerc meanwhile was finding the Ferrari not as good on the hard tyre as it had been on the soft. He held his gap over Bottas steady at 4-4.5sec but even at that relatively gentle pace, the tyre deg was heavier than expected. Vettel was finding much the same and didn’t have enough in hand to put any real pressure on Bottas.

It became obvious pretty soon after Verstappen rejoined that this was game on. The crowd began to stir as he caught the three in front at a completely different pace.

“The car really came alive in the second stint,” Verstappen later related. He caught Vettel on lap 49, got DRS on him and had a look at the end of the pit straight, then another one into Turn 4. But he did him cleanly the following lap, DRS helping him to fly by the Ferrari even before the braking point for Turn 4. The crowd roared above the engines. Ferrari responded by immediately bringing Vettel in for a set of softs with which to attack the fastest lap, calculating that it would lose position only to the struggling Hamilton with plenty of pace with which to repass him.

Next in Verstappen’s targets: Bottas. On the 55th lap was a Verstappen radio message: “I’m losing power.” And he suddenly dropped back. It was just an exhaust sensor playing up. With a bit of guidance from the pits about how to reset, he was back to full power soon enough – and Bottas wasn’t in a position to offer any resistance as the Red Bull scythed up his inside at Turn 3 on the 56th lap. Leclerc was just 5sec up the road now.

The leader tried as best he could to respond, getting into higher power modes and dipping into the high 1min 7sec. But it wasn’t enough. With six laps to go Verstappen was within DRS range of the Ferrari – and the crowd was going crazy. A lap later and he was alongside at both Turn 3 and 4, but Leclerc was defending perfectly.

Saving his energy for a lap, Verstappen relaunched his attack on the 68th lap, slicing up the inside of Turn 3 to take the lead – only for Leclerc to switch to the inside and get the tow up to Turn 4, where he was able to get back ahead. At much the same time Vettel on his new softs was within DRS range of Hamilton’s fourth place and all over the Merc like a rash.

The Controversy

It came on the 69th lap, two from the end, as this time Verstappen went yet-deeper on the brakes into the inside of Turn 3. At some point between turn-in and mid-corner Verstappen had the place, the Red Bull’s nose clearly ahead. Leclerc refused to surrender though and opted to stay side-by-side, around the outside. Verstappen held firm, the wheels banged – and Leclerc went off the circuit, losing a lot of momentum.

“What was that?” questioned Leclerc for the benefit of the stewards. “He pushed me off the track.” Verstappen was saying much the same thing. “I don’t think the second overtake was done correctly,” said Leclerc afterward, “but I believe that anyway the end would have probably been the same but it’s just not the way you overtake.”

“It’s hard racing,” countered Verstappen. “Otherwise we have to stay home… if those things aren’t allowed in racing, then what’s the point of being in Formula 1?”

The stewards looked at it and decided there was no case to answer.

Victory for Verstappen, Red Bull and Honda

The correct historical perspective is always difficult to ascertain in the moment. That hot day at Spielberg in 2019 didn’t feel like the heralding of a new era, but just a blip in Mercedes’ stranglehold on this formula. Indeed, there was another season-and-a-half of dominance from them to come.

Red Bull had not always been able to give Verstappen great cars and when they had – such as in 2016 and ’18 – they were still stymied by an uncompetitive Renault engine. This feel-good victory with Honda was a nice reward for the Japanese engine partner after its disastrous F1 re-entry a few years earlier with McLaren and the engine was good, not yet quite as powerful as the Ferrari, but competitive on power with Mercedes and pretty reliable.

But the Red Bull-Honda package was still not obviously going to be the place where Verstappen’s immense ability was going to be translated into appropriate success. It really did look like, long term, he’d have to find his way into a Mercedes for that to happen. Team competitive cycles are just too long for drivers to ever be comfortable committing their long term futures to a single entity. The whole of F1 knew exactly how good Verstappen was by 2019 and had done for a long time already. He was very obviously going to be the challenger to Lewis Hamilton’s pride of the pack status. He was already a truly great F1 driver, one of the absolute elite of history, routinely driving at a level only a handful had ever done.

On that day of victory Red Bull heard there was to be no future

But for that very obvious reality to be converted into general external acceptance always takes the numbing crushing of numbers. Such days still seemed a long way off that day in Austria.

Furthermore, behind the scenes there had been a worrying development that weekend. Honda corporate VP Seiji Kuraishi had travelled to Austria to tell the team in person: Honda would be announcing its withdrawal from F1 at the end of 2020. This had been a vexed subject within the Honda board, but now it had been decided and Kuraishi was here to give Red Bull 12 months notice before anything was announced. So it was somewhat ironic that this should be the very race of the breakthrough victory.

As things played out, although the announcement came at the end of 2020, it had by then been agreed to extend for one year. Subsequently a further extension of Honda involvement on very different financial terms was agreed to take it through to the end of 2025. But that day of victory in Austria ‘19, ostensibly a time of great celebration and promise for the future, was when Red Bull behind the scenes, heard that there was to be no future. Falsely, as it turned out. But that was how reality stood in that moment of celebration.

This was a highly historically significant race, but in the heat mirage of that scorching day things were not exactly how they looked on the surface.