There are 71 laps of the Red Bull Ring on Sunday, and the team whose name is painted on the grandstands will spend most of them looking at the wrong end of the timing screen. Seven rounds into 2026, Red Bull are fourth in the constructors’, winless, and watching Max Verstappen sit seventh in a drivers’ table led by a teenager in a Mercedes. The home race was supposed to be the highlight of their summer. It now looks more like an audit.
Spielberg is a strange little circuit - barely over a minute a lap, ten corners, three uphill straights that each end in a heavy braking zone. It flatters cars that stop well and put power down out of slow corners, and it exposes the ones that don’t. On current form, that is not good news for the hosts.
The championship
Andrea Kimi Antonelli arrives in Austria with a 41-point lead and five wins from seven. Here is the picture after Round 07 at Barcelona:
The numbers tell two stories. Mercedes have turned a fast car into a runaway - 72 points clear of Ferrari - while the team behind them is the one quietly building momentum. Lewis Hamilton won at Barcelona from second on the grid, his first victory in red, and has hauled himself up to second in the championship. Ferrari leave Spain looking like the only team with the pace to ask Mercedes a question over the rest of the year.
What Spielberg asks of the cars
The Red Bull Ring is a traction-and-braking circuit dressed up as a power track. Braking stability: turns 1, 3 and 4 are all big stops at the top of a climb, and a car that locks or squirms under braking loses the lap there. Traction out of slow corners: the exits of 3, 4 and 6 feed straight onto the next straight, so how cleanly the car deploys matters more than top speed. Kerb tolerance: the exit kerbs are punishing, and track limits at turns 9 and 10 have decided results here before.
“The lap is so short that one tenth is three places. There is nowhere to hide a weak corner.”
The 2026 rules add a twist. Three DRS zones and the active-aero system make this one of the easiest tracks to follow and pass on - good for the racing, awkward for anyone hoping to defend track position. Qualifying matters, but unlike Imola or Monaco, a fast car starting out of position can still carve back through the field. That suits Ferrari, and it suits a Mercedes that has qualified on the front row at all but one round.
The storylines
Red Bull are fourth and winless on the circuit that carries their name. Verstappen has one podium all season and sits seventh; the pressure at Spielberg will be on the team, not the rest of the grid.
Barcelona was Hamilton’s first win in red and Ferrari’s clearest sign of pace. Back-to-back strong weekends would turn a one-off into a title-fight storyline - and Spielberg’s braking zones should suit the car.
Five wins, a 41-point lead, and a second season already being measured against the greats. The only question left in 2026 is whether anyone outside his own garage can take points off him.