Author: Miles Fast

With Max Verstappen closing in his mirrors and Kimi Antonelli charging behind, George Russell did not blink. The Mercedes driver converted pole position into victory at the Austrian Grand Prix, winning by 1.611 seconds after 71 laps at the Red Bull Ring. Verstappen finished second for Red Bull, while Antonelli completed the podium only 1.986 seconds behind the winner. The result mattered beyond the trophy. Antonelli still leads the Drivers’ Championship with 171 points, but Russell is back in P2 on 131. That 40-point gap remains significant. Austria still changed the tone inside Mercedes. Russell arrived in Spielberg needing a…

Ferrari finally got ruthless with the rulebook. During the 2026 preseason test in Bahrain, its engineers arrived with a tiny winglet above the exhaust tailpipe, a device built to use exhaust flow and claw extra rear downforce from an area most teams had treated as closed. The idea worked because Ferrari had designed the rear of the car around it. Engineers moved the differential rearward and used space beneath the deformable structure to make the package possible. Crucially, the device remains legal for 2026. The FIA has now moved before the concept becomes a full paddock arms race. From 2027,…

In the fraction of a second it takes to process a flashing yellow light, George Russell won the Austrian Grand Prix pole and Kimi Antonelli lost his chance to fight for it. Russell seized P1 at the Red Bull Ring with a 1:06.113, beating Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc by 0.236s. Lewis Hamilton put the second Ferrari in P3, while Antonelli, Russell’s Mercedes teammate and the championship leader, had to settle for P4. The decisive moment came on the second and final Q3 runs. Max Verstappen was attacking in his upgraded Red Bull when the rear gave way at Turn 9. Yellow…

Verstappen’s sudden rear axle lock in Melbourne left Red Bull with more than a damaged car. It handed the team its first serious systems question of the new Formula 1 era. Before a lap time appeared beside Max Verstappen’s name in Q1, Red Bull had a telemetry problem it could not ignore. The four-time world champion began his first flying lap, braked for Turn 1, and immediately lost the rear of the car. It was not a slow spin or a small correction gone wrong. The rear axle locked without warning, sending Verstappen across the gravel and into the barrier.…

Max Verstappen does not usually get caught out by his own car. At Turn 9 of the Red Bull Ring on Saturday, his RB22 simply gave up. The crash came late in Q3 during Austrian GP qualifying. Verstappen had already felt a strange snap at Turn 6, but the fatal moment arrived when he committed to Turn 9, one of the fastest corners on the lap. The rear stepped away without warning. His RB22 spun through the gravel and hit the barrier before he could recover it. Verstappen escaped unhurt and held 5th on the grid through his earlier lap.…

A sudden lift of the throttle usually kills a Formula 1 pole lap. At the Red Bull Ring, it saved George Russell’s Saturday. Max Verstappen had snapped into the Turn 9 barriers in the final moments of Austrian Grand Prix qualifying. Dust hung over the exit of the fast right-hander. Yellow lights flashed as Russell arrived at one of the most committed corners on the lap, with pole still alive on his steering wheel. Russell had no time for guesswork. He saw a single yellow, lifted before the corner, kept the Mercedes stable, then got back on the throttle and…

If there was quiet hope inside McLaren that Austria had dragged Mercedes back into reach, Kimi Antonelli spent Friday afternoon making that hope harder to trust. At Spielberg, the 19-year-old Mercedes driver swept both practice sessions and finished FP2 with a 1:07.014 that became the number everyone else had to chase. Oscar Piastri did not look lost. He finished 3rd in FP1, then moved to P2 in FP2, 0.237 seconds short of Antonelli. Lando Norris also recovered to P3 after a hydraulic leak kept him in the garage for much of FP1. That still left McLaren in a familiar place:…

Kimi Antonelli put a clear marker down at the Red Bull Ring. On a short lap where tiny errors carry a brutal cost, the Mercedes rookie led both Friday practice sessions and left the chasing pack with a familiar problem: finding pace without losing balance. His best FP2 lap of 1:07.014 was 0.237 seconds quicker than Oscar Piastri, with Lando Norris third for McLaren. Max Verstappen claimed fourth for Red Bull, Lewis Hamilton followed in fifth for Ferrari, and George Russell ended sixth after failing to match his teammate’s soft-tyre pace in the afternoon. Friday practice never settles a Grand…

First, Adrian Newey. Then Christian Horner. Now, Paul Monaghan, the man who spent nearly 2 decades helping turn Red Bull’s fastest ideas into race-winning machinery, is preparing for the exit. Monaghan, Red Bull’s chief engineer for car engineering, is understood to be leaving the Milton Keynes team for Cadillac. Red Bull has not formally announced the move, and the final timeline remains unclear. Still, the direction is loud enough. Cadillac wants proven F1 knowledge. Red Bull is watching another old pillar of its championship structure edge away. This is not a background engineer slipping out unnoticed. Monaghan joined Red Bull…

There was no radio storm from Charles Leclerc this time. The warning came after he stepped out of the SF 26 at the Red Bull Ring and described a Ferrari that looked short of answers in two different places. The Scuderia reached Austria carrying the force of Hamilton’s Barcelona victory, plus a minor ADUO power unit specification centred on the internal combustion engine. By Friday evening, that optimism had thinned. Kimi Antonelli topped both sessions for Mercedes. Hamilton finished P5 in FP1 and FP2, ending the latter session 0.597 seconds off Antonelli’s 1:07.014 benchmark. Leclerc sat out FP1 while Dino…