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The Austrian GP

The Austrian Grand Prix will go down as one of the most exciting races this season. I am so happy for the Haas team! Just look at the joy in the pit as their two cars finish with points! A well-deserved success and I hope they continue their progress!

On to the elephant in the room: the Lando-Max Incident. Frankly, this situation was bound to happen. Once another driver finally has the speed to compete with the front-runner, they are one hundred percent going to take the chance. You could see it at the end of the Spanish GP when Norris was creeping up on Verstapen’s car. The McLaren pit tells Norris on the radio that Verstappen was struggling and...

...according to the Red Bull Race Report from Barcelona "[the] gap between the top two fell 5.7 seconds."

Norris and the McLaren Team must have thought they found Verstappen and Red Bull's weak point: the end of the race. Today, Norris pits at 10:04 for medium tyres and then begins his hunt for the leader. Two minutes later, Norris has the fastest lap and gets the gap between them down to a second. Thus begins the madness.

Norris tries and fails to properly overtake at lap 59, then at lap 63 Verstappen moves outside to maintain his position as Norris tries to overtake him. Finally, at lap 64, they make contact.

The big question everyone has been asking is, whose fault is it? If you go back and watch both of their driver's views and the highlights it's clear that Verstappen moved to his left to make the right turn as Norris tried to get outside of him. Depending on which driver view you watch it could be either driver's fault. You could say Lando was way too close or Max didn't check his mirror; however, there are two more important things to take away from this race. McLaren can catch up to Red Bull and Verstappen is not ready for when his car is no longer the fastest.

If you look at the back of the pack in this race, the cars are tyre-to-tyre and some make contact. In the earlier part of the race, Alonso makes contact with Zhou (lap 22) and takes a ten-second penalty for it. Also when the Alpine cars finally pass Alonso (laps 34, 35, 36) they are practically wheel to wheel around the next turn.

Yet, in this post-race interview with Verstappen, he states this about his incident with Norris:

"Yeah, it's, of course, unfortunate stuff, stuff that you don't want to see happening. It's as simple as that... But we also did so many things wrong throughout the race that we put ourselves, you know, in a position like that. So those are also things that we have to look at to improve."

Verstappen is right. The Red Bull team made some mistakes that definitively reduced the gap between Norris and Verstappen (for example their rather long last pit stop). However, the Red Bull strategy appears to be, let's create a huge gap between ourselves and the rest of the field because we have the talent to do that. Yet the effectiveness of this strategy is beginning to wear off as we see McLaren close this gap in these last two races. Verstappen is trying to speed away from the close-quarters competition which is standard for the middle of the pack. If Verstappen maintains this mentality, this could hurt Red Bull as the other teams get faster.

From the front runner's perspective, head-to-head, aggressive, and close competition is only OK at the back of the field. Other teams are finding their rhythm and Verstappen has to push a harder fight to defend his title.

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Lyrics: The Distance by Cake

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first haas podium first haas win

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the spanish gp is a movie

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SQUIRREL IN A COWBOY HAT ON INDYCAR

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I remember this when it happened live I was like omg

Mia: inaudible*

Charles : I will say what I want.

oh he's PISSED

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Sometimes tumblr puts two posts together and it just makes me chuckle

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also feel free to elaborate in the comments