Race start, Red Bull Ring, 2022

Rate the race: 2022 Austrian Grand Prix

2022 Austrian Grand Prix

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What did you think of today’s race? Share your verdict on the Austrian Grand Prix.

RaceFans has held polls on every F1 race since 2008 to find out which fans thought of each round of the season.

Join in the latest poll and give your verdict on the race: 10 being the highest and 1 the lowest. Please vote based on how entertaining and exciting you thought the race was, not on how your preferred driver or team performed.

What were the best and worst moments of the race? What was the main thing you’ll remember about it? Rate the race out of ten and leave a comment below:

Rate the 2022 Austrian Grand Prix out of 10

  • 10 (8%)
  • 9 (22%)
  • 8 (33%)
  • 7 (27%)
  • 6 (5%)
  • 5 (4%)
  • 4 (0%)
  • 3 (0%)
  • 2 (0%)
  • 1 (1%)

Total Voters: 218

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1 = ‘Terrible’, 10 = ‘Perfect’

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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74 comments on “Rate the race: 2022 Austrian Grand Prix”

  1. Decently exciting race & tense ending.

    1. Yeah, overall it was quite a good race @jerejj.

      It felt maybe a bit too easy how fast both Ferrari cars got past Verstappen once his tyres went but Leclerc did it with a really beautiful move. And we got some creative passing from Russel, good defensive and attacking from many drivers through the field.

      Apart from Gasly defending somewhat questionably and the drivers having to get used to staying within the track limits here (and Tsunoda also has a few awkward moments) we had really quality racing going on through the field.

      One thing I would say is that I feel we are starting to see Mick Schumacher getting into it – showing how he really needs a bit of time to find his groove – he had really solid races the last few weekends.

      1. Indeed, he’s done really well lately.

  2. A very exciting race. A solid 9/10 from me. 😁

  3. What a race, these ground effect cars can race, battles up and down the track. A 9 is just about right.

  4. This was a very, very easy 10.

  5. Loved the race. All the action we got in Silverstone at the front of the grid, we got in the mid-pack but little spoiled by track limits.

    So if Silverstone was 10, this was an 8

  6. Alonso drove the most amazing race and he would have come out in 7th with much fresher tires after the VSC if Alpine hadn’t sent him out with a loose wheel. Then be proceeded to make up 14 total seconds in time deficit to P10 in just 10 laps.

    It is a shame he isn’t in the Ferrari because he would be so far ahead of Sainz it wouldn’t even be funny. He must be so frustrated with Alpine costing him a chance to get a good place every single time they have a fast car

    1. To clarify he had to pit twice in two laps.

    2. It is a disgrace for F1 to not have him in either a Red Bull, Ferrari or Mercedes. These teams not putting him in one of their cars are disfavouring the sport. Have him take Perez or Sainz’s seat and he is a true championship contender.

      1. Indeed, it’s especially impressive at his age, because he should be losing like half a second per lap at that age compared to his peak.

      2. Problem is was his mouth against Honda that costs him a lot! So no Honda engines for him in Indycars and no hope in any teams with Honda engines.

      3. He has made a lot of bad career decisions, he must be like that guy we all have at work who is good at his job but so annoying that he generates negative work elsewhere.

  7. 7. A good tense race with some great moves although nothing really memorable.

    1. My pick as well. It was a good solid race.

  8. Now that was a race. Really good. Fighting all over the place, how different strategies panned out, everything was just great.
    Ferrari and Alpine again managed to fail.
    Instead of getting 20+ points on Red Bull in WCC and ~10 points in WDC, Ferrari lose a car.
    Instead of fighting for top 6 with Alonso, Alpine decides to pit him twice under the VSC and lose everything. Did they put hards again, so that they had to put mediums? Did they fail to attach the wheels correctly? Does it matter? What a failure, not a team. Technical issues and silly strategical mistakes in almost every race for Alonso. In the end, Ocon destroys the Spaniard on points.
    On Russell’s penalty – not sure it was worth a penalty. Unlike in Vettel incident, where Vettel left plenty of room and still was hit by Gasly, Russell had nowhere to go and Perez just closed the door like he is the only one in that corner.

    PS: the race was great.

    1. Yeah he came out in 7th after his first VSC pitstop and was so fast who knows where he could have ended up, but they need to pit again because a wheel was lose. What a shame they weren’t showing more of his passes or talking about how insanely fast he was during that race. After his second (third) stop, he came out roughly 20 seconds and 4 places behind 10th and made that all up in 10 laps. Alpine just keeps screwing him over and over again.

      1. Indeed, they also didn’t show his last overtake on bottas, I saw it looking at the gaps but hardly any got broadcast at that point, too busy watching verstappen not catch leclerc.

    2. If I got it right, a problem with a wheel for ALO, not attached properly. Too bad for him. Overall, he still got it, wish he had a better car.

  9. great race. 9

  10. Much better than yesterday!

  11. I thought that was okay. Petered out a bit at the end, but mostly alright.
    7.

    1. Interestingly, all of the sprint weekends so far (except Imola) has had a pretty decent GP after the sprint, despite all the complaints from the usual suspects about the sprints ruining the weekend…

      1. The awful silly gimmick sprint lovers clutching at straws looking for anything to desperately try and justify it’s unpopular existence.

        Is that you Ross?

        1. Says the person who deliberately fails to see any positives in it, and takes every opportunity to say so.
          You also make a big note of how tyre deltas are a negative to you – and yet they are the exact same reason that most overtakes happened during earlier decades of F1, and indeed still happen in this and every other motorsports series.
          If you don’t like differences in tyre performance, @roger-ayles, surely you should enjoy the sprint then? No tyre changes at all.

          It seems to me that you actually enjoyed the racing here, but can’t admit it simply because you dislike the event format. You dislike it on principle….

          Am I Ross?
          Negative, Roger.

          1. It’s not that I dislike differences in tire performance as such, It’s more that I don’t like how much bigger a factor is now than it used to be.

            In decades past even when you had a tire compound difference or a difference in tire life it was never as big a factor & you were still able to see some competitive racing & battling where the driver behind still had to work hard to find a way past & where defending & holding onto the place was still possible.

            It’s that tire delta been as big as it can be now along with a fairly powerful DRS on almost every straight that produces the more straightforward passing rather than the more competitive battling, defending & hard fought for overtaking that I don’t like about where F1 has gone over the past 10 or so years.

            As to enjoying the racing today nor not. I wouldn’t say I hated it but it’s just all a bit unsatisfying & forgettable. You have the quantity but there’s a lack of quality & I will always maintain that it’s the quality the produces the true excitement & which makes things memorable.

            And in terms of seeing positives in the sprint. I’ve tried to see some positives in the format & just don’t see any. I don’t like qualifying on Friday when its harder to watch live due to work, I don’t like cars been in parc ferme from then on, I don’t like how irrelevant FP2 feels, I don’t like how qualifying is less meaningful due to setting the grid for a sprint rather than the GP, I don’t like the sprint race as I feel it takes away from the GP & would rather watch traditional qualifying in it’s traditional slot.

            Believe me for as negative as I am on it I have tried to see positives, I have tried to like it & I do try to enjoy it….. I just don’t see any positives & just don’t like the format & I make no excuses for making my feelings on these things known because I am deeply passionate about the sport & have been for I guess 40+ years at this point. I still love everything I always did, I just don’t like the show it’s been tuned into & I won’t apologise for that.

          2. I’m not nearly as passionate about F1 as you seem to be – but I’ve still been watching it for more than 35 years.
            F1 has changed so much in every way throughout that period. There are so many features missing that I used to enjoy – and they haven’t really been replaced with equally enjoyable features – but recently F1 has felt like it was getting old and stale to me. Shaking up the format is a breath of fresh air and an added challenge for competitors that I enjoy seeing them deal with.

            The sprint also seems to have had the effect of making the GP’s more intense in a way – yet again this time the fight for the lead was harder and faster than it usually is during GP weekends without sprints. That ‘practice race run’ gives every team more knowledge on what they’ve got and also what they are up against.
            Much like a practice session does – except there’s nothing to hide because it’s in competition, which is the part most people watch sports for.

            You can dislike them and all that they represent, that’s your prerogative – but could you also accept that other people do get value and enjoyment from them and the changes they bring?
            With respect?

            And the tyres? You weren’t told event a tenth as much about F1 tyres in the past. During the tyre war era, secrecy was everything. Tyres were being made not just for individual teams, but even for individual drivers. Their compounds were kept private, and the teams had access to many more types at each event. Only for that specific event, no less.
            Additionally – the teams (and tyre manufacturers) knew so much less about the tyres, and how to get the best from them. They now have massive databases of information on each compound and how they perform and wear, and the cars are designed from the ground up to extract every last percentile of performance from them at all times.
            I’d suggest that the difference now seems bigger to you because the overall difference in performance (field spread) is so much smaller. A big difference now is 1 second per lap with fresh rubber, whereas 30 years ago that was a small gap on cars even with the same age and compound tyres on – such was the difference in machinery.

  12. Just proved the point I made after the sprint yesterday.

    The sprint races will never be as entertaining as a GP because shorter races will always lack the elements that go into producing the interest & excitement in a GP. It’s the strategies, Tyre wear, track evolution, management & the long game thinking from everyone over a GP distance that produces the excitement & you don’t have most of that in a shorter sprint.

    1. So true @stefmeister

      The “Sprint” pales to the whole race. Today strategy played out for the drivers and teams. Made a difference.

  13. BLS (@brightlampshade)
    10th July 2022, 15:42

    Very enjoyable, shame about Sainz but that Ferrari looks fragile. Fights throughout the field so can’t really ask for much more.

  14. Lost a point for me because of the Perez and Sainz retirements. That meant the best racing was in the midfield. And another point for all the track limit penalties, which were fair but distracting.

  15. 8 for me. My biggest complaint was DRS made the pass/repass ridiculous. I’m convinced it’s time to try some tweaks – either tone down DRS or see what happens if its removed completely. It felt like there would have been plenty of action without DRS.

    A lot of solid drives, Mick looked great all weekend. Pleased to see him looking like he belongs in F1.

  16. Gets a 6/10 from me.

    May seem low but it’s a 6 because it highlighted a lot of the stuff i hate about the current show over sport F1.

    Yes there was a lot of stuff going on with passing and so on, But it all felt very unsatisfying for me because it was all down to big deltas in tire performance and DRS so none of the ‘racing’ was actually especially competitive because of those tyre deltas & DRS resulting in big performance differences between them.

    You see cars catching another and can see the pass coming because of those big performance/speed deltas and when you know a pass is going to be inevitable it just saps all the tension out of it & in the cases where there is no real battle and the car behind catches & passes immediately there’s just no real excitement to it.

    It’s just quantity over quality & while i guess the younger low attention span generation love just having the quantity, I really miss having the quality because it’s the quality you get from truly competitive racing & exciting organic overtaking that creates the excitement & is memorable.

    Everything that went on in races like todays will be forgotten very quickly because again it has quantity but lacked the true quality that makes races memorable for years after the fact.

    1. @roger-ayles I’m really not a fan of this circuit. It’s basically a test track for cars not drivers. All the same right-hand corner with the only variant midway adding very little. Like you said, it always comes down to whether the faster car can nudge past inside or outside or maybe a switch back. It always seems to be the same moment we’ve seen countless times over the years, repeated with different protagonists.

      1. I saw a move into turn 1 as well as a couple of moves in the mid section. Plenty of overtaking all around the track or at least glimpses of overtakes. Compare it to say Bahrain with only two or three in spite of the longer laptimes.
        The corners are hardly the same too. Seems like a bit of a stretch to call them all samey considering Singapore and Baku are on the calendar. Each and single one of them has different elevation or radius. The last two turns are stunning in a high downforce car. The first three braking zones are all very different and yet we saw overtakes happen in all of them.
        What I dislike are the turn four overtakes. Almost impossible to go around the outside with the current driving standards.

    2. I kinda agree.

  17. Very enjoyable race, with fights everywhere. 8.5/10

  18. 8.

    Good result for Ferrari and LEC… unexpected for me, and in a positive way. And SAI was going for 2nd, on merit! The nice surprise kept unwrapping. Reckon did not see this Ferrari win coming (1-2 actually), I was pretty sure VER is gonna run with the win, be it even slowly but surely. But the gap to VER is still very big and Ferrari still seem to have reliability problems which almost sure will somehow translate into lost points at the end of the year, so it will be a very hard job for LEC/Ferrari to win the WDC. It’s a must for LEC to become the top scorer in the 2nd part of the season.

    1. There’s no saying right now ferrari is less reliable than red bull, I would say the bad strategies are more ferrari’s problem when compared to red bull.

  19. 7. Good race and good coverage by the tv crew…I mean camera work, not Crofty.

    1. @bassclef I have to turn the vol right down at the start and then again last lap or two when Crofts fake crescendo builds until the driver is over the line.

      Do people generally like this clown?

      1. *Croftys

      2. I do the exact same thing. Listening to Crofty is exhausting at best. If it weren’t for Martin Brundle sitting alongside him I would switch to different commentary in a heartbeat.

      3. Croft is a pest and needs to be removed but sky always has “jobs for the boys”.. similar to alonso at enstone f1..

        Charles was 3 tenth behind max and about to overtake but he says max is doing a great job keeping him behind… clown croft cheapens the product but liberty media/comcast must love him because his low iq low impulse control shouty dad joke commentary is suited to the zoomer demographic they are trying to bring into the sport.

        1. Ah, indeed, this I noticed as well, even the last race they were talking about verstappen gaining too much of an advantage and didn’t notice he had bodywork damage, and in this sprint all of a sudden they said “oh, hamilton is through”, instead it was a lapped car, when he was trying to overtake schumacher.

      4. If you’re impressed by crofty yelling, you should watch the italian broadcast, vanzini is worse, he also tends to repeat things 3 times, “what a disaster x3” in singapore 2017 for example, or when a driver has a problem “problems, problems, problems”, when ferrari got a fine in hockenheim 2019 for unsafe release same thing!

      5. I only prefer the Sky feed because of Brundle. But today he sounded out of sorts and Crofty was filling all the gaps with his usual guff so I switched to the main feed. Much better, though I found it odd that the commentator was referring to the podium as the “rostrum”. Even as a native English speaker it’s not a word I hear much, particularly in the F1 context.

    2. @bassclef On f1tv you have an alternative, unfortunately this weekend the alternative was Tom Gaymor who is a Crofty copycat, including the same cricket analogies. In my view Drs, directing and Croft are the 3 major problems right now with f1.

      1. I’m not overly critic towards the commentators, but indeed they’re sometimes unaware of things, drs and directing are indeed terrible most of the times.

      2. Croft is most annoying mostly at the start. This F1TV guy is grating for the entire race persistent all the time. I want to throw something or throw up.

        Monty Python members do great satires of over the top (english) announcers. This guy exceeds the satiire.

  20. 7. I really enjoyed seeing Leclerc focus and put in a great drive, well-deserved win. Ferrari seem to be on the edge with engine pace/reliability. Hopefully it will work for Leclerc over the next few races and he can get much close to Verstappen and put the championship race back on. Some entertaining battles elsewhere. Need to see it again maybe, but no idea where Russell was supposed to go on the first lap, Perez was over-aggressive yet again.

    1. Need to see it again maybe, but no idea where Russell was supposed to go on the first lap, Perez was over-aggressive yet again.

      Russell was supposed to go further to the inside so he didn’t make contact with the car legally overtaking him.
      Perez was clearly ahead before the braking zone – that seems to be the metric they use for overtaking these days.

      Russell admitted he braked late on the dirty line and was expecting contact – and since Perez was already ahead….
      Guaranteed penalty.

      1. Looking at the main footage, Russell hits the apex, so the problem, if any, would be him moving too far left on the exit. I need to see another angle. At first sight, it seemed a first-lap racing incident to me (and the race commentators) only penalised because of the effect on Perez’s race. Russell was only there too because Sainz went off track and then used the end of a slip road to keep speed and ahead of him.

      2. I agree a penalty for Russel but I don’t get it why Perez didn’t leave more space. PER had enough space on the outside so why take the risk?

        1. He was ahead…
          Under F1’s (often nonsensical) ‘racing rules’ the car ahead has all the power, and the car behind just has to avoid them.

  21. I really enjoyed seeing Sainz and Leclerc going off track repeatedly! Are they not being watched by the stewards? As for the non-race, if their “tanks” were 100 kilo’s lighter and they didn’t have to change tyres, and they got rid of DRS, we might have had a race! Looking to be an unmemorable year for Fat 1!

    1. Sainz got 2 warnings and a black and white flag (so only 1 away from a penalty) and Leclerc I think cut it out a bit after having gotten 2 warnings, so I don’t think they were doing it that much more than most of the field today @jjfrazz

  22. Solid 9 / 10

    Up top: great overtakes for the win, dramatic DNF from Saint, decent suspense in the final laps.

    Midfield: awesome comeback from Alonso, great drive from Mick.

  23. Another very entertaining race to watch. Lots of battles, some drama (poor Sainz) and even some tension at the end of the race. This season keeps on giving.
    9/10 for me.

  24. Solid race, above average. 6/10

  25. Solid 7/10 from me. I thought Verstappen had this easily bag, so my expectations were exceeded as we had a somewhat decent fight for the podium positions and some good midfield action.

    1. I second that. For me it was far better race than the last week’s Silverstone, which has been dubbed by many as one of the best races in recent years. This was far purer racing for me, not impacted by coincidental safety cars and strategic farce from one of the teams.

    2. True, same for me, wasn’t expecting ferrari to have better pace in the race, looked like even sainz could’ve maybe got past.

  26. Deg made the difference, drs was a drag as usual. Not to say f1 should rely on deg or any type of free passes but deg is far more natural element of racing than the gimmick drs.

  27. At one point in the race there were 5 cars fighting for 1 position.
    There was an Alpine, a Mclaren ,one Alfa and the Haas cars all fighting at the same corners simultaneously and that was the best thing I have seen at the pinnacle of racing in recent years.
    Not good to see DNFs for Sainz And Perez but still a 10/10 for the edge of the seat exhilaration.

    1. Yes, that point was great, I remember the commentators being excited as well.

  28. Can we rate the tv director separate from the race? At times really frustrating. You see a nice move at turn 3, but you know that leaves room to fight back for the position along the coming straight. But no we get a replay of a Hamilton slow pit stop we actually just watched, live on the tv feed. So we can see it again. But slower… I want to see that battle play out!

    1. Agree, a constant thing of f1 is bad f1 directing!

  29. Again, like in silverstone, a very eventful race, with battles throughout, I didn’t expect verstappen to be under threat from both ferraris, there was at some point a group of 5 cars attacking each other, with even multiple attackers at the same turn, and lots of midfield battling, I gave it a 9, and looking at this:
    4 (1%)
    5 (4%)
    6 (4%)
    7 (26%)
    8 (32%)
    9 (25%)
    10 (8%)
    Total Voters: 156

    Looks like 95% gave this a passing mark, as opposed to 40% in the sprint, but I guess that’s no surprise since not much happened there by comparison.

    1. Shame for alonso’s race being ruined by yet another alpine mistake and great recovery by russell, mr. consistency indeed.

  30. 8/10. I thought about a 9 but decided not.

    There was some good close racing up and down the field. Especially early on. It’s not too difficult to pass in this circuit which helps. The battle for the lead was very tense especially towards the end. I was expecting RBR to hit their sweet spot ar some point and it looked like Max was going to at the end but ran out of laps.

    Glad to see Charles’ victory to keep the WDC alive. Between strategy and reliability though, Ferrari seem destined to make their life difficult.

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