Racing
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Ferrari turned a second-and-third-place start into only fifth for Lewis Hamilton and eighth for Charles Leclerc in the Austrian Grand Prix, with team principal Fred Vasseur saying the damage came from a basic lack of pace and overheating that the team then worsened by chasing Mercedes too hard.
That made Spielberg a sharp comedown for Ferrari after Hamilton’s win in Spain. At the Red Bull Ring, the Scuderia recovered from a difficult Friday to put Leclerc on the front row and Hamilton alongside in third, but over 71 laps the SF-26 could not live with Mercedes or Max Verstappen once race pace and tire management mattered.
Vasseur, speaking after the race, made clear he did not see strategy as the root cause. “The strategy is not the issue, I think the issue is that we didn’t have the pace of the Mercedes and [Max] Verstappen,” he said. “We tried to compensate taking risks on the strategy, but it was not a good fight.” He added that Ferrari had also “paid” for a poor Friday.
The more revealing part of Ferrari’s explanation was how that deficit spiraled. Vasseur said the team “overpushed probably the first couple of laps to stay with them” and that effort overheated the cars and “destroyed a bit everything.” In a separate post-race assessment, he admitted Ferrari had misjudged the race it should have been running: “Looking back, we were probably too focused on Mercedes today.”
That focus had been framed as an opportunity on Saturday. After qualifying, Hamilton said Ferrari could work “in tandem” with Leclerc from P2 and P3 to put pressure on Mercedes through strategy. But he had also acknowledged Mercedes held a clear underlying advantage through the weekend, and Sunday exposed that gap rather than closing it.
The race pattern backed up Vasseur’s diagnosis. Ferrari was the only one of the four leading teams to commit to a three-stop race, a move born from the way its pace and tire life were falling away rather than a plan that unlocked anything. Hamilton was later told to manage high temperatures, and both Ferrari’s own account and Sky Sports F1 analyst Jamie Chadwick pointed to the same combination of problems: overheating, high degradation and weak straight-line speed.
Chadwick said Ferrari “bet on the strategy, but it just didn’t work,” adding that the team’s straight-line deficit made overtaking difficult and left both cars vulnerable once they lost track position. She said she was surprised by how far Ferrari dropped back during the race, but identified overheating as the likely main factor behind the collapse.
Hamilton’s own verdict matched that picture. He said Ferrari was “still struggling on the straights” and that tire degradation was “quite high,” even after a race in which he briefly thought a strong result might be possible. The team’s pit work, he said, was not the issue.
For Ferrari, the result turned the lift from Barcelona into a setback heading straight into Silverstone. It also cost Hamilton ground in the championship, leaving him third on 125 points after George Russell’s Austria win, behind Russell on 131 and leader Kimi Antonelli on 171.