Former driver expects 'typical' Red Bull magic: 'Russell will wonder what went wrong'

The Friday sessions showed mixed data: the Austrian outfit didn’t shine in the long runs during the first and only practice, but Verstappen still managed to put the RB22 in P3. The gap to Hamilton was three tenths, but the result was encouraging. Afterward, the Dutchman said they still needed to work on cornering balance and also referred to battery management.

Ferrari seemed to be much better at that during sprint qualifying. “It was exceptional from Lewis I have to say,” Palmer tells GPblog. “he looks like he's absolutely on fire at the moment,” he praises the seven-time champion. That Antonelli qualified just eleven thousandths behind him was no surprise to Palmer: “Kimi was Kimi, you know he's going to be quick because he's just consistent with it at the moment. So the surprise was George to not be there.”

The performances of the driver from King’s Lynn have been fluctuating quite a bit lately. For now, he hasn’t been able to carry the momentum from the Austrian Grand Prix forward. “George is blowing hot and cold at the moment with his lap. So when he hooks it up he's very quick, sometimes he's just scratching his head and that was yesterday, but it might not be tomorrow.”

Palmer thinks Russell’s headache is currently bigger than that of Red Bull and Verstappen. Since Verstappen felt fairly comfortable in the car, a large part of the setup already seems to be in a good place. Now they need to deal with the conditions and fine-tune the final bits. The Saturday sessions can also be used for that. “Yeah I think Red Bull, they normally come better for Grand Prix qualifying than the sprint,” the former Renault driver believes.

“I still think with how close the field is, and actually Isaac Hadjar looked good as well yesterday, so I wouldn't rule either of them out for being competitive over the race,” Palmer says, referring to both the sprint race and the Grand Prix. “In Austria as well the race pace was very strong, so I think Red Bull are close, Ferrari a big surprise but very very impressive and we will see what McLaren can do if they can close up a little bit as well.”

At the moment, McLaren aren’t quite in the mix, even though they showed their competitiveness a few weekends ago. However, the British team seems to have more in the pipeline. “We’ve done a fantastic job with their upgrades. We’re a little bit behind,” Brown said in response to a question from GPblog. “So hopefully we’ll have as many as Ferrari has and you don’t know when their next one’s coming. So I think the whole story is a bit early in the year because, as Fred said, you deploy them when they’re ready. They got them ready earlier than ours. We have just as many upgrades coming, we just haven’t put them on the race car yet because they’re not quite at the level that we’d like it to be before we produce the parts. Clearly Ferrari and Red Bull have done a fantastic job.”

Lando Norris missed out on a top-five starting spot for the sprint race by seven thousandths, with Oscar Piastri a further 32 thousandths back. Russell may also have to take both McLarens into account.