In his home race at the Red Bull Ring, GP2 driver Rene Binder was unable to lay on a points-scoring display for his many Austrian fans, but they at least saw a combative performance. It was a backs-to-the-wall situation for the 23-year-old and his Trident team-mate Raffaele Marciello, as the team engineers tried to find the reasons for unusually rapid tyre wear.
After finishing 17th in the main race and 14th in the sprint, Rene Binder ruefully contemplated the scoreboard: “Just like in yesterday’s main race, I got off to a perfect start and even managed to overtake my team-mate Raffaele Marciello early on to put myself into eleventh. But then the tyres started to degrade badly, and I rapidly fell back. In the end, I had to content myself with at least finishing 14th. Even though there was no lack of effort on my part and I’ve received plenty of backing, the current situation is extremely difficult for me to accept.”
The 23-year-old from Zillertal (Austria) is especially annoyed that, unlike in previous years, he is not even able to benefit from his usual tyre-friendly driving style: “Normally, I’m able to gain lots of places during the course of a race, but if the car isn’t set up one hundred percent perfect, it doesn’t matter how your treat the tyres, you’ll still find the rest of the field gleefully sailing past after a few laps.”
Binder qualified with a deficit of eight tenths of a second on pole-sitter Stoffel Vandoorne, a time with which he was not unduly dissatisfied: “For one thing, Vandoorne is an absolutely exceptional driver who also happens to have the fastest car in the competition. Consequently, he has everything going for him. Also, I clearly lost between two and three tenths in traffic. I can live with the knowledge that I was half a second slower in qualifying, but over the race distance, we once again had big problems.”
In a crisis meeting called at short notice on Sunday afternoon, Trident Motorsport discussed far-reaching measures to get a grip on the current tyre problems as quickly as possible. “I’m just glad that, in Sauber F1 reserve Lello Marciello, we have a driver in the car whose speed is beyond question. And if even someone like him can’t finish in the points here, that speaks volumes. We certainly need new ideas, otherwise it’s looking quite grim for the next few races.”