At most there might be some minor issues on track, but there won’t be any more major problems that directly force the car to retire.

Red Bull’s overall pace is also pretty good, and with their natural advantage and experience in aero design, the chances of Mercedes challenging Red Bull and actually beating them in the latter half of this season are very low.

On top of that, Zhou Guanyu is also benefiting from his teammate’s grid drop.

He was originally starting from P13, and now he’s moved straight up to P12.

Having run almost half a season in the F1 paddock, both Zhou Guanyu’s mentality and skills are already tending toward maturity.

His starting position for this race isn’t bad at all, and in front of him are the McLarens, who’ve had no real competitiveness these past few seasons because of funding problems at the team’s headquarters.

As long as the team doesn’t push Zhou Guanyu too hard with the strategy, Zhou Guanyu has a very good chance of bringing home points for the team again in this race.

Even in the worst case, if McLaren, as the "starving camel still bigger than a horse," proves too much and Zhou Guanyu can’t step over the minefield of the McLaren drivers during the race.

Aren’t there still two Haas cars up ahead?

So Zhou Guanyu should at least be able to finish tenth and take one point from this race.

By the time the broadcast cut back to the track, the teams had already started lowering the cars off the jacks.

And they’d pulled off the tire blankets as well.

This time Alpine didn’t forget to remove the tire blankets from Alonso’s car.

For this race Qin Miao’s tire choice is still the soft compound.

Because Qin Miao saved an extra set of softs in yesterday’s sprint, he goes into today’s race with two sets of softs, one set of mediums and one set of hards.

So for today’s race, the Mercedes strategy group wants to put Qin Miao on a two-stop.

The planned tire strategy is soft–medium–soft.

If something unexpected happens on track in the middle phase, going to the hards isn’t off the table either.

The Red Bull Ring is a high-speed circuit with a lot of corners, and with so many high-speed turns the tire wear is naturally higher than at a normal track, so today the mainstream strategy is still a two-stop. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

Very soon, in the orange smoke flares lit by the crowd, all the drivers, led by Verstappen, started their formation lap.

It’s worth mentioning that the veteran Alonso played a little trick before the race start.

Normally, before the race begins, the drivers will just come to their grid slots at a normal pace, park up and wait for the cars behind to line up.

But since Alonso didn’t even run yesterday’s sprint qualifying, he’s starting this race from the very back of the grid.

Yet he just dawdled along, taking ages to do the last sector.

Verstappen had already been sitting on his grid slot for almost a full minute before Alonso finally crawled his way to his own spot and parked the car.

In that one minute, Verstappen’s tires—whose temperatures weren’t that high to begin with—dropped at least 20 degrees.

Of course, it wasn’t just Verstappen; basically all the drivers starting up front saw their tire temperatures drop to varying degrees.

But Alonso did finally stop his car in the right place.

The five red lights overhead came on one by one; the race was about to start.

Moments later, the five lights went out and the race was underway.

This time Qin Miao’s launch didn’t have that timid feel of the sprint qualifying start.

Qin Miao got off the line very well, clearly better than Sainz starting ahead on his left.

Part of that was Qin Miao’s reaction time, and part of it was the soft tires doing their job.

Because of that, by the time they reached the braking zone, Qin Miao had already pulled alongside Sainz on the inside line.

Qin Miao was right at the limit controlling the car; the left-side wheel arch was almost brushing against Sainz’s car beside him—Sainz moved left, Qin Miao moved left; Sainz moved right, Qin Miao moved right.

And that wasn’t all. Sainz, who had already braked at what felt like the absolute limit for him, looked over in some shock and disbelief as Qin Miao hit the brakes about five meters later than he did.

Seeing that, the first thought that flashed through Sainz’s mind was that Qin Miao had messed up big this time—he’d missed the braking point and was probably going to fly straight off.