Ferrari set for test of championship hopes in Budapest, McLaren’s big upgrade package set to break cover, George Russell looking for a result before the midseason break, Aston Martin’s existential upgrade position, engine rules

Every driver wants the midseason break. Some of them, though, don’t just want it; they need it.

The 2026 championship hasn’t gone in quite the way we expected way back in March, and while that means some drivers will go into the break on a high, others are scrambling for anything that might break the run of play.

You can probably put some drivers into each category now. Title leader Andrea Kimi Antonelli will probably have quite a relaxing break. Teammate George Russell might struggle to clear his head.

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But what about the Ferrari drivers? And what of McLaren? Both their seasons are on a precipice, and the results this weekend could decide whether they’ve had a good or bad first half of this most unusual season.

CAN FERRARI PROVE ITS TITLE CREDENTIALS?

Ferrari was braced for pain at Silverstone and Spa-Francorchamps. These high-speed, engine-sensitive circuits were always going to bring out its car’s worst quality, namely its lack of engine deployment relative to Mercedes.

But then Charles Leclerc won the British Grand Prix and led much of the Belgian Grand Prix, and Ferrari walked away from both as the highest-scoring team.

True, both results relied on some good fortune — or bad fortune if you’re Mercedes — but Ferrari was genuinely competitive despite its pessimistic expectations.

The form has raised expectations for this weekend.

PIT TALK PODCAST: Andrea Kimi Antonelli leads the championship by 45 points after another disastrous weekend for teammate George Russell, but can a big upgrade for McLaren this weekend turn the tide on its disappointing 2026 season? | Listen to Pit Talk here >

The Hungaroring is the opposite sort of circuit to Silverstone and Spa-Francorchamps in the realm of permanent tracks.

Whereas the previous two venues are open, fast and flowing, the Hungaroring is tight, twisty and slow. Engine performance doesn’t matter much here, but downforce does.

For months the Ferrari car has been estimated by its rivals to be carrying the most downforce, explaining its class-leading speed through the corners.

This weekend, then, should see Ferrari at its best.

That’s the theory, anyway.

“On paper the Hungaroring could suit the characteristics of our car a little better, but that alone is no guarantee,” team boss Frédéric Vasseur said. “As always, execution will make the difference.”

Charles Leclerc put Ferrari’s reservations more clearly.

“I recall very well what the overall feeling was before Monaco, and we arrived in Monaco and were underperforming compared to what everybody thought we would,” he said. “I think we need to be cautious.”

The Monaco example is cautionary, though that race came before the team brought its big Barcelona upgrade that appears to have changed its fortunes.

The weather could also be problematic given Ferrari has struggled with tyre wear in warmer conditions — see its Austrian Grand Prix flop. The forecast suggests it’ll be around 29°C for qualifying and 32°C for the race, with track temperatures around 50°C.

In Barcelona, where it was also warm, Ferrari was able to get around that problem by giving Hamilton an additional pit stop on a day the two-stop and three-stop strategies were closely matched.

Strategy, then, could be key to Ferrari getting the most out of the weekend.

If it can leave Budapest with a victory — especially if it nails its strategy on the way — then we really could be looking at a Ferrari title charge.

WILL RUSSELL GO INTO THE BREAK ON A HIGH OR A LOW?

After Russell’s dire Monaco weekend saw him fall 68 points behind Antonelli, some coined the phrase ‘Russell reset’ to signify the Briton’s mental repositioning ahead of the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix, which was to be the start of his real title campaign.

Four rounds later and he’s still 50 points adrift, having been comprehensively outperformed by Antonelli at three of those four weekends.

The last of those, last weekend in Belgium, was the most interesting.

On the one hand, Russell convinced his Mercedes team that there’s something going on with his engine that’s leaving him down on speed on some straights.

According to The Race, Mercedes has found a problem “deep in the code” of its engine software that was frontloading his electrical deployment, leaving him with not enough battery charge late in the lap.

The team has applied a fix for this weekend. It’s unclear if this will also apply to Oscar Piastri’s car, the Australian having suffered a similar problem in qualifying in Belgium.

But on the other hand, crashing out of the race on the first lap felt a little like overreach by a driver under pressure.

He’d lost some places down the Kemmel Straight owing to another, unrelated engine issue — Mercedes said it has identified and patched this too — but he attempted to make up seemingly all his lost ground in one around-the-outside move on Lewis Hamilton at Les Combes.

The stewards blamed Hamilton — contentiously — but Russell should’ve known positioning his car there would put him at risk of serious contact, regardless of the moral right of being there.

He’d been 25 points down on Antonelli before the start of the race. Damage limitation was never going to be an appealing prospect for a driver who’s received so many beatings by his teammate, but a clearer head might have recognised the costly alternative.

Certainly his post-crash radio rage suggested some deep-seated frustration.

If that ‘Russell reset’ is ever going to come, this weekend would be a choice time for it.

After a bruising opening half to the season, how valuable would it be for Russell to go into the midseason break with a good result under his belt? What effect might that have on his preparation for the densely packed second half of the season?

It wouldn’t represent a swing in momentum or even be significant of any great new hope for his championship campaign, but it would be a sorely needed bright spot — a reminder that he can get the job done even under these rules that appear not to suit his driving style.

Because if Russell can’t reset himself now, when will he?

CAN McLAREN SAVE ITS SEASON?

It’s make or break for McLaren.

The defending constructors champion has barely fired a shot this season, with Lando Norris’s Miami sprint win the highlight so far to go with one second-place finish apiece for each driver in the grands prix.

McLaren realised sometime earlier this season that it had committed to some wayward car design concepts and has spent months backtracking and rerouting. In that time it’s been usurped not just by Mercedes but by Ferrari and Red Bull Racing too as each has brought upgrades to the track.

McLaren has brought relatively few parts in the interim but has confirmed that it will bring a “valuable package of upgrades” to the last race before the break, “marking another milestone in the car’s development pathway under the new era and regulations of Formula 1”.

The upgrades include a new floor, among other parts, and the team will also trial its version of the Ferrari-style rotating rear wing after having teased it at previous rounds without ever running it. The team cautions, however, that it won’t be “fully introduced” until the Italian Grand Prix at the earliest.

McLaren is also buoyed by Mercedes giving it access to some new power unit simulation tools that might help the team catch up in terms of engine usage, where there’s been a gap at most races.

These highly complex hybrid motors are physically identical, but configuring them and the software that governs them leaves considerable room for interpretation, which is where McLaren feels it’s been lacking for most of the year.

“They are starting to be available, and we are definitely taking great benefit,” team boss Andrea Stella said.

Combined with good form in recent history at the Hungaroring — Piastri claimed his maiden win here in 2024, and Norris won last season, having also finished second in 2023 — the team will arrive in Budapest knowing how to do well here.

The timing is just about right. McLaren will complete this major upgrade cycle at the Dutch Grand Prix immediately after the break, by which point it will be clear whether the team will be in a position to challenge for regular wins again.

If it can get there, McLaren point to the recent history of 2024, which suggests it’s capable of against-the-odds comebacks.

But it really can’t afford for Hungary to be another anonymous weekend lest it be forced to confront the fact that its championship reign is already over.

CAN ASTON MARTIN RESTORE SOME DIGNITY?

There’s a lot on the line for McLaren, but at Aston Martin this weekend is almost existential.

The team has had an unimaginably bad start to the season, even before considering the sky-high expectations foisted upon its big-spending super team.

It started roughly on par with newcomer Cadillac, a team that technically didn’t exist barely 12 months earlier, and its gamble on pooling all its resources on one big upgrade for this weekend has seen it slide into oblivion over the opening 10 rounds of the season as others have continued their development pushes.

Aston Martin is now more than a second adrift of Cadillac at the back of the field, racing no-one and competing for nothing.

Adrian Newey’s legendary status as a title-winning designer is unimpeachable, even if not every one of his cars has been a winner, but the year so far has been way, way below even the lowest of the team’s expectations.

It’s why there’s so much at stake with this weekend’s all-in-one upgrade — notwithstanding the second phase of the update isn’t due until the next race in Zandvoort, after the break.

There are rumours that the team expects the total upgrade package — plus Honda’s new engine, also due in the Netherlands — to be worth up to 2.5 seconds per lap. That would be a most remarkable improvement in one step, particularly for a team that has comprehensively failed to land its upgrades pretty much since 2023.

But taking the average one-lap pace from the last three races shows that even this gargantuan step would put the team only just ahead of Cadillac and perhaps marginally ahead of Williams. That is, Aston Martin would be the ninth-quickest team, perhaps not even fast enough to contend for a spot in Q2.

“We have not been racing over the last events, and this is what we need to return to,“ said chief trackside officer Mike Krack, per Racer. ”Where we race in that big competitive field, we will see. This I can really not predict.

“But the key question is that we are back in the game, because we were not before. If we manage to fight for something, then we are back in the game — back racing — and have understood half or the first third of the character [of the new car], then I think it would have been a good weekend.”

Just being near other cars in the midfield isn’t exactly what it signed up for — not exactly what seemed to be on the cards when Newey declared in Australia that he had the fifth-best chassis that would’ve been capable of regular Q3 appearances. But that’s the reality.

On top of that, the team is braced for Fernando Alonso to make a decision on whether he stays next year or retires from the sport.

The Spaniard has said his decision won’t be directly tied to whether the upgrade delivers everything it’s promising.

But it’s also not irrelevant.

At a time Alonso has been forthright about his lack of enjoyment in this regulatory era, it’s difficult to imagine him wanting to commit to the team for another season if it can’t offer him even a glimmer of hope that things might improve.

To lose Alonso in part over a hopeless situation would be a major blow to prestige, never mind the performance he brings on track.

You can bet every set of fingers will be crossed when the car rolls out of pit lane for FP1.

NO MORE ENGINE CHAT (FOR NOW)

F1’s 2026 engines met their nemesis in Belgium last week, where the legendary Spa-Francorchamps uncomfortably exposed all the biggest problems with the formula.

The layout of the track demands maximum battery power without offering much in the way of recharge opportunities — the worst possible scenario.

Hungary, though, will thankfully be different.

The slower, windier circuit offers bountiful opportunities to recharge the battery without any driving tricks, and it features only three short straights.

After two weeks, Silvertone included, of handwringing over the 2026 engines, this weekend should see the car package at its best.

That also means we’re unlikely to hear too many complaints about the black box of machine learning sitting between the throttle and the power unit that Russell, Piastri and others complained about in Belgium.

The shadowy hand of the engine algorithm is most obvious at tracks where the energy has to be rationed for the places where it offers the most bang for buck. At tracks like the Hungaroring, there will be relatively less for the computer to think about.

This track should also show off the 2026 cars themselves in a better light. Though the Hungaroring has moved into the medium-speed bracket of tracks as downforce has increased over the years, it’s still at the slower end of the spectrum, which is where the previous-era ground-effect cars were at their least impressive — compared to, say, Silverstone.

The slightly lighter, narrower and livelier 2026 car should be challenging and exciting around this 40-year-old circuit, sending the sport into the midseason break on something of a high.