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Fast cars, lightning reflexes, and the unknown future-- this is Blind Corners. News and chatting about the latest topics around the Formula 1 World Championship. Hosted by Bryce Castillo. Putting the 'theory' in critical racing theory since 2023.
[This transcript has been generated]
[0:00] Coming up, Max is laughing about Silverstone, Mercedes says Ferrari is almost out of money, and all the other important news ahead of this week's Great Britain Grand Prix. I'm blind Bryce Castillo, and this is Blind Corners.
[0:13] We are on the other side of the Austrian Grand Prix, where George Russell got his second win of the year, even if not everybody thought he was the fastest. Red Bull team principal Laura Mechies said that he thought that the pace ranking at the Red Bull ring was first Max, then Kimmy, and then George in third. Of course, with Max's shock spin at the end of qualifying and Kimmy's early race troubles, and also because of Max spinning, George kind of had a bit of a head start, and he had all the consistency. He's Mr. Saturday. He brought it home to Sunday. Good for George. Good for George. We've got a race. We have a title fight, maybe. Actually, can we talk about George's qualifying? So he set the pole position after he ended up lifting for Max's accident, and he still got pulled by like two-tenths. I, like many of you, was incredulous, I guess is a good word.
[1:02] While watching it live. It definitely seemed like George was pushing through a yellow flag zone. George wasn't like right behind Max. He was a good five or ten seconds behind. When George went through that sector, it was only a single yellow flag, not a double yellow flag. And so it seemed obvious that like, oh no, that's the end of qualifying, everyone behind Max is not going to be able to set a fast lap because they're either going to have to slow or really slow for double yellow flags. But when it's a single yellow flag, you don't have to lift and go as slow as a double wave flag. And then also the double yellow flags are like an automatic lap time, like deletion. And so it's not a stretch to say that Kimi could have brought the fight to George,
[1:42] which is just kind of academic at this point. After promising an engine upgrade, Ferrari was on the back foot in Austria.
[1:50] I've seen it speculated that because Ferrari have a smaller turbo, that that is slower in the high-altitude tracks like Austria or Mexico. Team principal Fred Vasseur admitted they were, quote, overheating and destroying everything, end quote, by overpushing in the first couple of laps to stay with the front runners. They also did a three-stop, while the rest of the top ten finishers only did a two-stop. And Lewis called it a reality check and pointed ahead to Silverstone, quote, lots of straights and lots of deployment and not many places to recover the power. It's not a good recipe for Ferrari or really anybody this week, but we'll talk about that later. Also, as a follow-up to last week, McLaren ended up aborting their plan to test their Macarena, the McLarena, the Macalorena, the Macklemore Arena, their rotating rear wing. It sounds like it just didn't work right when they installed it. That car missed a lot of Free Practice 1, which is where they said they were going to test it. So they didn't do it. Maybe we'll see it in a few weeks at Spa. But overall, the Austrian GP was fine. I mean.
[2:53] Mercedes are dominating the field. So the least that they could do is give us like a good intra-team battle. And we've seen it, but there just wasn't any in Austria. And so it kind of, it was a little bit of a snoozer. I was telling somebody here that they shouldn't watch the full race. They should just watch the 30-minute race in 30. He came back and told me I should have just watched the race in 30.
[3:16] Silly season is looming as we get closer and closer to that summer break. Last week, McLaren CEO Zach Brown had talks with Max Verstappen's management team over a potential driver deal. The race understands that those talks absolutely happened and that Brown took the meeting because that's his job. But this isn't necessarily what it is on its face. It's not Max trying to push Oscar Piastri out of the team. It's more leverage. We've known for a while that Max has like a performance clause in his contract where if he's not at a certain position in the standings by summer break, I think I've seen it's like P2, he has the option to exit his contract and leave Red Bull. There's not really anywhere Max could feasibly go to without making the season really silly. McLaren on multi-year deals, Ferrari had just signed multi-year deals.
[4:07] It would need to be a team making a big swing and convincing Max to go with them this season, and none of the teams that would be a step up from Red Bull would do that move. But if the Verstappen camp can make Red Bull sweat a little bit, make him wonder if he's actually going to leave, it could lead to better concessions for a new long-term deal with Max. I mean, if they can convince him that the car will be good enough over the next few years, he might stick around in F1. But then it's not that he would go to another team. It's that he would just fucking leave the sport. And look, this could just be for more money. This could be he doesn't want to do PR stuff. Maybe he doesn't want to do Girl the Grid. We don't know. We'll see when the next Girl the Grid comes out. And Red Bull has a lot to sweat about. They've had all sorts of personnel changes. Obviously, this season and last were not as great for Max as they could have been. And ultimately, Red Bull need to plan on what they're going to do now. Either what it looks like for Max to stay at the team long term for, you know, three or four years, maybe. Or what happens if they can't convince Max. And either way, they need to start working on that now.
[5:13] With the new 2026 rules and regulations, teams are scrambling to bring updates to their cars while also staying under the spending cost cap. In fact, Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff speculated that Ferrari will, quote, run out of cost cap soon because they've been throwing things at their car massively. It's rich for Mercedes to talk about this, but go off. Ferrari's Vassur responded saying that their car and engine upgrades were timed to reduce spending later in the year, and I'm rubber in your glue. Staying on Mercedes for another second, despite the fact that they were given an Aduo engine upgrade token for this year and next. Wolf says that they don't have an engine upgrade coming, just new power units of their existing design, which everyone's allowed to do.
[5:53] You have separate tokens for that. On the other side of the grid, this weekend is supposed to be the showing of a new Williams upgrade package. They have been talking over and over about how their car is overweight and they're not, which is every team's problem. But we will see what the FW48 looks like in Silverstone. They have a great driver pair. Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz are great drivers. They are very good drivers. They are like 8 out of 10, 8.5 out of 10. Very good. Very good. A B. But the longer that we're in this phase of Williams, the James Vowell's phase,
[6:26] basically, the better of a sense of how long it takes to revamp a Formula 1. team. And that'll be interesting to this last wrinkle here. Aston Martin are planning a new upgrade for Hungary. That's the last race before the summer break. A designer and still team principal, Adrian Newey explained how Aston Martin got to being slower than a brand new team on the grid. Similar to Williams, Newey found that Aston Martin's infrastructure, their processes were out of date, or had been patched together for a very long time. He even said that parts of the processes dated back to the old Jordan teen days. So there's a lot of cruft going on. Newey also mentioned that there was little time to test out different aerodynamic concepts and that a lot of the development had to address their Honda engine vibration earlier in the year. He mentioned that the car was overweight. Again, all the cars are overweight.
[7:18] But a very pragmatic sort of sense of it was, well, we ran out of time and losing weight is part of spending time and efficiency developing the car. So, you know, they were in a rush. They had all the reliability issues at the start of the season, so they had to pick a thing and go. Also, Newey was not at full speed. He had a health condition that he was dealing with in 2025, so that also kind of distracted from how much he could put into the season. You know, Aston Martin this season, we're supposed to be, they are a perfect storm of a team. They're just not the right perfect storm. They got a new factory, new facilities, new air tunnels. They got Fernando Alonso on the team still. and it's not working. They're not finding it. And they're way behind. Even more than usual. Even more than they have been.
[8:08] And finally, Maxxer7 had a real harsh omen for the upcoming GBGP this weekend. Quote, I did a few laps on the simulator and I just started laughing. Not in a good way, it seems. So Silverstone is a fast power circuit. It's got a lot of high speed straights and not a lot of heavy, slow braking zones. Normally, that would mean good old classic racing action. But kind of like we saw in Suzuka that tracks like this don't work great with the current engine formula. The formula is all about recharging your battery, and if you don't have slow parts of the track, then you don't have the parts of the track where you build that battery back up. So who knows what's going to happen this weekend? The British Grand Prix is like the home Grand Prix for the whole sport. This is a season where the whole sport has looked not at its best. All right, that's going to do it here for today. If I missed something, it was because it was not important, and that's the only reason why. Thank you for listening. We will be back ahead of the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa coming July 17th through 19th. If you like this, throw us a bone over on Patreon. Patreon.com slash LFGX. Also, Marbles is back. Summer Marbles 26 is rolling on Thursday nights. Check it out. Brycas, B-R-Y-C-A-S, on Twitch. That's going to do it, y'all. I've been Blind Bryce Castillo, and this has been Blind Corners. Meow.