Verstappen took Red Bull’s fifth win in a row at the Red Bull Ring on Sunday and increased his lead in the drivers’ standings over Lewis Hamilton to 32 points.
Hamilton lost an “easy second” place after sustaining damage to the rear of his car, which slipped him to fourth place behind Mercedes team-mate Valtteri Bottas and McLaren driver Lando Norris.
While positions two and four represented an upward trend compared to qualifying, in which Hamilton and Bottas only took positions four and five, Mercedes Engineering Director Shovlin said the team was “not satisfied with the result”.
“I think we would have been happy with a second and a third, which realistically was the best we could have done,” said Shovlin. “We were a bit of the creators of our own problems with the bad qualifying yesterday. That made it very, very difficult even to think about challenging Max.
“I think in reality his pace was too fast. Even if Lewis had had one stint, I don’t think we would have bothered them.
“The car didn’t work well, but then we had a breakdown on Lewis’ car with some deterioration of some aero parts on the rear cake pan and that cost him a lot of performance which ultimately knocked him back from second place.” for the fourth.
“Overall a bit frustrating, both from a performance point of view and from the fact that we have to keep the car in one piece.”
Mercedes saw their cars get outqualified on Saturday by both Red Bull drivers and McLaren’s Lando Norris, who also spent most of the first stint of the race ahead of Hamilton and Bottas.
When Hamilton overtook Norris in second place on lap 20, the gap to Verstappen at the front had already grown to over nine seconds.
The difficulties in qualifying came despite an impressive Friday for Mercedes when it put in a 1-2 result in FP2.
Shovlin explained that Austria’s softest compound tire – the C5 – did not work as well on the Mercedes W12 on Saturday as it did on Friday because it offered less performance in the warmer conditions.
“We weren’t particularly strong here in general,” said Shovlin. “That shows not so much in the deficit to Red Bull, but in how much pressure we really had with McLaren and Lando did a great job but ended up in front of us in the end.
“[For] For some of them this track doesn’t suit the car and we haven’t made any real progress in either of the races here. So this feels like a bit of a longer term thing.
“And then this very soft mixture, the C5, simply didn’t give us as much in the hot conditions on Saturday as it did on Friday. And there is another question.
“It wasn’t so much that we did something wrong, but if you look at the order in which it was performed, we have to acknowledge that we are not doing something right.”
