August 23, (THEWILL) – The Formula 1 challengers of Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team in this year’s calendar Red Bull have insisted that they are “fully motivated” to hit back against Mercedes as the gripping title fight between the pair of F1 heavyweights and their star drivers Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton resumes at the Belgian GP on Sunday, August 29.
Red Bull had opened up big championship leads thanks to a run of five straight race victories from Monaco to Austria, only to enter August’s summer break behind Mercedes on the back of scoring just a combined two points from the last two events where, perhaps season-defining, chaos ensued and Hamilton stepped ahead.
That chaos came from a combination of crashes. There was the Hamilton and Verstappen and Silverstone crash plus a pile-up involving Mercedes’ Valtteri Bottas and the two Red Bulls in Hungary. It was a situation that combined with an upturn in Mercedes form to see the world champions move 12 points clear in the team standings.
Though it was not foreseeable in the early start of the racing, when Red Bull’s Max Verstappen cruised ahead of the Mercedes pair of Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas, the defending champion, Hamilton has retaken the lead while putting eight points between him and Verstappen in the drivers’ table ahead of Sunday’s Belgian GP.
It makes the Grand Prix a major test of Red Bull and Verstappen’s title credentials. They will be intensely motivated to immediately wrestle back the momentum from Mercedes before it extends further to keep within sight of breaking Mercedes hold on the championship.
Verstappen, who has demonstrated a resolve to claim his first F1 world title with his racing earlier in the season said: “It’s a lot of freak moments at the moment that cost us a lot of points. They are of course very quick, but we never give up.”
Christian Horner, the Red Bull Team boss, added to what his race driver said: “We’ve had six victories, and the races we’ve lost are with a tyre explosion [in Azerbaijan], being taken out at Silverstone, and then Hungary. I think we’ve got a lot to be positive about and the whole team is fully motivated.
“We’re going to come out for the second half of this championship and it’s all to play for. The difference between second and first, I think the second half of this year is going to be epic and we’re not giving up anything.”
Sunday’s Belgian GP, is the first race since August 2 and it is scheduled to kick-start a bumper run of five Grands Prix in six weeks, which will go a long way in establishing how the teams stack up on the standings and which drivers will be in command going forward.
Jude Obafemi is a versatile senior Correspondent at THEWILL Newspapers, excelling in sourcing, researching, and delivering sports news stories for both print and digital publications.
