It looks like the Grand Prix weekend in Styria could be a bit of a disappointment. Around the Red Bull Ring there will be rain and thunderstorms all weekend and there is a pretty good chance that the rain will fall as well.
The inaugural Styrian Grand Prix in 2020 also saw a lot of rain over the weekend, with qualifying held in completely wet conditions. Back then, it was Lewis Hamilton who was by far the best driver on the wet track, with Max Verstappen a close second.
Rain again in Styria
At the second edition of the Styrian GP rain seems to play a major role again. According to Weather.com there is a 93 percent chance of rain on Friday. The percentages are decreasing, because on Saturday the chance is 49 percent and on Sunday only 40 percent. The temperature also rises during the weekend from 21 degrees on Friday to 28 degrees on Sunday.
So it will be a difficult weekend for the Formula 1 teams in Austria. The changing conditions during the weekend makes training and testing for qualifying and the race almost impossible. On Friday the conditions are completely different to those on Saturday and Sunday, where rain is constantly lurking.
No action on Friday in Spielberg?
If we zoom in on Friday, we see that it will start raining from 08:00 local time and that the chance of rain from 11:00 (when the first session of the day is just half an hour away) will not drop below 73 percent until 21:00. With a maximum temperature of 21 degrees Celsius, the track will not dry out quickly either.
It remains to be seen if we will see any action at all on the track on Friday. On the one hand teams will want to know how the track performs in wet conditions because the rest of the weekend might be wet as well, but with the shortage of rain tyres per race weekend teams won’t want to use up a lot of tyres. In addition, with the budget cap, it is not advisable to take extra risk of a crash, so teams will be extra careful this year.
