From being the British Grand Prix’s pantomime villain jeered literally at every turn, the boot will be on the other foot for Max Verstappen in Austria.
Large numbers of Silverstone’s sell-out crowd clearly had still not forgiven the Dutchman for stopping their hero Lewis Hamilton from becoming an eight-time World Champion in 2021. Some, inevitably, never will.
But as the boos rang out for the Red Bull driver, and cheers whenever he found himself overtaken or even challenged, there was at least one consolation – Michael Masi, if he had been there, would have had it a whole lot worse.
The Austrian Grand Prix, however, is the home race for Verstappen’s team due to their ownership, and the first of four within the next five on the calendar where the Oranje Army will be out in force.
Hungaroring, Spa and, of course, Zandvoort are the other venues to which hordes of fans from the Netherlands flock.
Being supremely confident in his own ability, Verstappen is not one to buy in to all that ‘crowd being worth a second a lap’ malarkey, a phrase coined by Nigel Mansell back in the day. But even for a pragmatist like the 24-year-old, it must be preferable to have the public on-side rather than celebrating when things go awry.
That was the case at Silverstone where a likely comfortable win for the World Champion turned into P7 struggling to fend off a Haas, the damage literally having been done when he ran over a piece of debris on lap 12 that played havoc with the underbody of his car.
Yet such had been his dominance over the previous six races, and with victory in Britain going to Carlos Sainz for the first time in his F1 career, that Verstappen heads to Spielberg’s Red Bull Ring with his lead in the title race a still extremely healthy 34 points.
And besides knowing he will have huge support from the grandstands, Verstappen has a collection of happy memories at this venue to call upon.
His three Austrian Grand Prix successes, added to another in the 2021 Styrian GP on the same circuit, makes him the most successful F1 driver of all time in the Alpine nation – a feat he had achieved by the tender age of 23.
Last year’s double triumph on consecutive weekends was achieved by 35 and 17 seconds and although this season’s cars are entirely new, which could render historical form irrelevant, it is easy to see why Verstappen has been made an odds-on favourite for Austrian win No 5.
Indeed, what also needs to be mentioned is that this is a sprint…
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