Prime Tire Newsletter | This is The Athletic’s F1 newsletter. Sign up here to receive Prime Tire directly in your inbox twice a week during the season and weekly in the offseason.Welcome back to Prime Tire, where today we’re enjoying the sights and sounds of the Austrian Grand Prix — easily Formula 1’s most beautiful track.Sound familiar? That’s because I dedicated an entire PT send to that topic last year, but fear not, there will be no breaking out into the sounds of Styria today. There’s just too much to talk about already at the Red Bull Ring.I’m Alex, and Madeline Coleman will be along later.Revelation: Disclosure of 2025 injury raises QsLewis Hamilton is the talk of the town right now.His sizzling victory in Barcelona last race not only looked like the Hamilton driver of old — specifically, his metronomic run to victory at the same track in the 2020 Spanish GP, one of his best wins for Mercedes — but it ignited hope of a multi-team title battle. Right when things looked like a Mercedes walkover.George Russell called Hamilton’s Ferrari squad “a huge threat” at the FIA news conference yesterday, as this weekend’s event got underway at the Red Bull Ring.“Kimi (Antonelli) is still very much the driver out front and is performing really incredibly and consistently,” Russell said. “But Ferrari feel like they’re coming, and Lewis is at the forefront of that.”Such talk suits Mercedes. By talking up its rival, Mercedes amps up the pressure around Ferrari and creates a bigger fall in public perception if they then stumble. Russell was doing exactly the same thing when he said championship leader Antonelli had the title “to lose” at the Monaco race.Because that’s the thing about F1 drivers speaking publicly: There’s almost always something else going on. Which leads me to a pretty stunning revelation from Hamilton himself yesterday in Austria: The seven-time world champion opened up about a neck injury from early 2025 that he only ever referenced after winning in Spain. Although Hamilton didn’t reveal too many specific details.Hamilton said he “knocked out one of the discs in my neck, which was into the nerve” in a crash during a private test at the Barcelona track just a few weeks after he joined Ferrari in January 2025.“I couldn’t do a lot for like nine weeks,” he said. “I was having chiropractor (appointments) every day. Every day I couldn’t sleep.“I had painkillers, I had to get an injection. I did everything I could to try to fix it.”In those nine weeks after that crash, the 2025 F1 season went through a full preseason test in Bahrain and held the opening races in Australia and China.The 2025 campaign would go on to be one Hamilton called a “nightmare,” due to his poor pace and results compared to new teammate Charles Leclerc.