Chapter 1070: Chapter 409: Ferrari: Has My Luck Turned Around?

The following Sainz was not really on Qin Miao’s radar, as it was an undisputed fact that his lap times were not as fast as Qin Miao’s who was on soft tires.

However, Qin Miao’s attention was drawn to Verstappen’s position.

Calculating, Leclerc was now 1.2 seconds ahead of Verstappen, already outside Verstappen’s DRS zone.

But before this, Leclerc had always been within Verstappen’s DRS zone.

Qin Miao was looking to see if he could win the championship in this race.

However, after overtaking Leclerc, Qin Miao’s skills would go into cooldown.

By then, his only strategy against Verstappen would be to use the car’s speed to overtake him from behind normally.

But this season, the Mercedes car’s performance was clearly not on par with Ferrari and Red Bull.

Qin Miao’s appearance in this position was still reliant on his remarkable tire management skills.

So, to overtake Verstappen, it would be quite challenging on the track and could only rely on an undercut.

After realizing this, Qin Miao voluntarily withdrew the skills he had placed on Leclerc and slightly increased the time gap between him and Leclerc, keeping it within the range of 0.8-1.1 seconds.

As long as he caught up to within 1 second of Leclerc before entering the DRS detection point, it would be fine.

Leclerc had initially prepared to focus more on Qin Miao behind him, but for some reason, he suddenly felt the pressure lift, and Qin Miao slightly widened the distance between them.

Even though he didn’t know if Qin Miao encountered some problem with the car or anything else, Leclerc still understood that, for whatever reason, Qin Miao was no longer pressuring him.

But his current primary goal was still to stay with Verstappen ahead and attempt to snatch that damn first place.

However, because of Qin Miao’s aggressive attacks on Leclerc earlier, by the time Leclerc caught up with Verstappen and began attacking him, it was already the 10th lap.

Of course, even though the two cars ahead of Qin Miao were already fighting, Qin Miao at this moment didn’t have the ability to slip through during their entanglement.

Because Qin Miao’s current set of soft tires was degrading faster than he and the Mercedes team had imagined.

At this time, even though the two cars ahead were continuously attacking and defending, all Qin Miao could do was barely keep himself within 1.3 seconds of Leclerc to ensure he wasn’t falling behind.

After persisting on the track for two more laps, Qin Miao finally went into the pits to change tires under the team’s request.

This time, Qin Miao changed to a new set of medium tires, and the tire changers added some intensity, with the total pit stop time being 3.4 seconds.

The tire changer on the right rear wheel failed to remove the tire on the first try.

But fortunately, this was the only mistake during the tire change, and the delay was not significant, only 1 second.

The most crucial part was that when the team called Qin Miao back, there was a spacious window behind him, and Qin Miao didn’t lose more positions after coming out.

After coming out, Qin Miao landed in 8th position, with Mick Schumacher and Magelsen ahead, and Zhou Guanyu behind.

Zhou Guanyu’s performance in today’s race was also extremely excellent.

Starting at 12th, his start speed was unbelievably fast for an Alfa Romeo car.

Just at the start, he overtook two cars, and subsequently seized the opportunity when Ricardo made a mistake out of a corner to leap from 12th to 9th.

Of course, besides the impressive Zhou Guanyu today, two other drivers were surprising as well.

They were the two drivers jokingly called Haas Twins: Mick and Magelsen.

These two drivers unexpectedly showed speed on the Red Bull Ring track that matched their current ranks.

Haas was so fast today that it was hard to believe it was Haas cars running.

And after Qin Miao came out, Norris was 1 second behind him.

At the same time, just as Qin Miao emerged from the pit lane, a resolution came between the previously tightly contested Ferrari and Red Bull ahead.

In the DRS zone before T4, Leclerc latched onto Verstappen’s slipstream, and by the time they reached the braking point before T4, Leclerc had already closed to within 0.2 seconds of Verstappen.

Then Leclerc braked late and forcibly cut to Verstappen’s inside line.

And before the apex, he had his car’s nose in front of Verstappen’s.

Even though he over-accelerated a bit while exiting the corner causing a brief understeer, Leclerc quickly stabilized his car, preventing it from losing control.

Leclerc naturally completed this overtaking maneuver on Verstappen quite beautifully.

In front of sixty-thousand Austrian fans at the scene, he bypassed Verstappen directly.

However, after Qin Miao learned of this through the team’s radio, he curled his lips in dissatisfaction, suspecting that Leclerc might have been able to overtake Verstappen directly but waited because Qin Miao wasn’t making a move behind.

He only made the move after Qin Miao’s soft tires exhausted their durability.

Of course, this was just a baseless speculation by Qin Miao with no facts to back it up.

In reality, Leclerc hadn’t thought of this; he purely seized the opportunity at that moment to overtake Verstappen ahead.