Mercedes tops Red Bull in Austria as rival upgrades hit trouble
Mercedes dominated opening practice at the Austrian Grand Prix, exposing costly reliability flaws in heavily updated cars from Red Bull and McLaren that threaten to undermine their championship campaigns.
Kimi Antonelli led George Russell in a Mercedes one-two during first practice at the Austrian Grand Prix on Friday. The session laid bare the operational fragility of their closest competitors, with both Red Bull entries and McLaren's Lando Norris losing crucial track time to mechanical and software failures. Antonelli, who leads the Drivers' Championship by 41 points over Lewis Hamilton and 50 over Russell, edged out his teammate by just 0.040s.
Red Bull arrived at its home race with what amounted to almost an entirely new car, featuring visible aerodynamic changes designed to close the gap to Mercedes. Instead of gathering comparative data, the team was forced into damage limitation. Max Verstappen suffered software glitches that brought him to a halt in the pit lane twice within the opening 20 minutes.
"The whole car is shaking under braking," Verstappen said. The lack of running denied the team the opportunity to evaluate its engineering investment. "It's not ideal, especially for Red Bull because they brought a big update here so would have wanted both cars out there, gathering data and gaining comparisons," said Sky Sports F1's Karun Chandhok.
Teammate Isack Hadjar fared even worse, losing roughly half the session to an engine change after a late problem was discovered. McLaren's competitive footing was also undermined by a hydraulics leak on Norris's car, costing him 45 minutes of track time. While Oscar Piastri managed to put his McLaren third, just one tenth behind the leading Mercedes, Norris was immediately on the backfoot.
Ferrari brought an upgraded engine to the Red Bull Ring but appeared to deliberately run it in a lower performance mode. As a result, Hamilton's fifth-place finish, over six tenths off the pace, may not reflect the Italian marque's true competitive position. The session also saw Formula 2 driver Dino Beganovic take over Charles Leclerc's car, finishing ninth as the best of the six mandatory rookie drivers.
For the European manufacturers backing these teams, the practice session underscored the high cost of unreliability. Mercedes continues to extract clean, uninterrupted data to consolidate its championship advantage. Red Bull and McLaren must now rapidly diagnose their issues before Saturday's qualifying, turning a controlled test of new parts into a high-stakes repair operation.
