- Saturday F1 action delayed indefinitely due to rain

Styrian Grand Prix – Saturday’s F1 track action at the Red Bull Ring has been delayed indefinitely due to heavy rain hitting the area.

The expected heavy rain forecast for Saturday at the Red Bull Ring has arrived, with the Saturday morning Formula 3 race red flagged due to undriveable conditions and poor visibility.

With the rain continuing to pour down, the Formula 1 sessions scheduled for Saturday are now ‘delayed indefinitely’ with the intention of trying to find a gap in the weather.

However, with the rain expected to be bad for the day, it’s highly likely Formula 1 will not run on Saturday. This means that qualifying may be pushed out until Sunday.

“There’s lots of options to put it simply. If a worst-case scenario was to come about, we’ve already had a look and qualifying could take place on Sunday morning.” said F1 Race Director Michael Masi.

“If we had a complete washout on Saturday, free practice three and qualifying didn’t take place and hypothetically qualifying couldn’t happen on Sunday morning because of weather, we would revert back to free practice two times.”

“Or there’s the third iteration, which is free practice three can happen but we can’t have qualifying in the afternoon or qualifying Sunday morning and the grid would highly likely be set on the free practice three times.”

If the grid for Sunday’s race – which is set to be warm and dry – were to be defined on FP2 times, Max Verstappen would start on pole position, ahead of Valtteri Bottas, with Racing Point’s Sergio Perez and Lance Stroll locking out the second row after going into FP2 with the mindset of treating it as their qualifying session.

Reigning world champion Lewis Hamilton would start sixth, with Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel down in 16th and Renault’s Daniel Ricciardo last after he crashed in FP2.