Formula 1 expects Ferrari to perform strongly this weekend. Ferrari’s rivals expect Ferrari to perform strongly this weekend. Ferrari expects Ferrari to perform strongly this weekend.
Given how increasingly difficult it’s been to read form at the front of the field this season, imagine the surprise when Ferrari rolled out and actually did perform strongly at the Hungaroring.
The Italian team led both practice sessions but dominated FP2 in particular, with Lewis Hamilton leading Charles Leclerc at the top of the time sheet.
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Hamilton was 0.148 seconds quicker than his teammate and a whopping half-second quicker than the rest of the field, led by Lando Norris in third.
“So far so good,” Ferrari principal Frédéric Vasseur said. “But it’s not on Friday you are doing pole and even less that you win the race.
“It’s good to start the weekend like this, but let’s see tomorrow; it could be another story.”
Though Ferrari looks undeniably comfortable at the front, there is some uncertainty in the results.
The field spread was unexpectedly massive, with 2.99 seconds separating all 11 teams.
Last year the field spread in qualifying was just 0.985 seconds from fastest team to slowest.
This year only five drivers and four teams fit into that margin.
Even last year’s FP1 session was tighter, with 1.4 seconds separating the teams — just nine drivers and six teams managed that margin.
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We can say for certain that the field will tighten at the seventh-shortest circuit on the calendar come qualifying. Ferrari’s margin will shrink.
But there’s a lot of work to do for Ferrari’s rivals to close that half-second deficit.
FERRARI’S ADVANTAGE CLEAR ON FORMIDABLE FRIDAY
It’s rare for Ferrari to end Friday looking competitive, even when it’s gone on to win the race.
In Barcelona, eventual winner Hamilton was more than 1.2 seconds off top spot, for example.
In Hungary, however, there’s been no real doubt about Ferrari’s supremacy, the team topping the time sheet no matter the tyre.
“Normally we are on the back foot on the Friday,” Leclerc said.
“It was a relatively strong day. From the beginning I felt quite good with the car, and performance seemed to be good straightaway, so that’s a good thing.”
The telemetry makes clear why there was no real struggle for Ferrari on Friday — and it correlates exactly with expectations.
The team is unbeatable through the corners, holding a high minimum speed through pretty much all of them compared to all its frontrunning rivals.
It makes up more than enough of a buffer through the plentiful slow and medium-speed corners to absorb the time is loses down all the short straights to Mercedes, McLaren and Red Bull Racing — or, more specifically, to the Mercedes and Red Bull engines.
The advantage of prodigious downforce on the Ferrari car pays a second dividend.
At hot and busy Hungaroring, the challenge is to keep the soft tyres alive for an entire qualifying lap. A common sight on Friday was drivers trying to corral expired rubber into the last corner, where they’d commonly wash wide.
But Ferrari had a massive advantage there, its tyres fresher than the rest.
On his fastest lap in the last corner, Hamilton was 6 kilometres per hour quicker than Norris, 7 kilometres per hour quicker than Max Verstappen and 10 kilometres per hour quicker than George Russell when comparing minimum speed.
That’s a good advantage with which to start the weekend.
Leclerc cautioned, though, that Ferrari couldn’t expect rival teams not to reach for that benchmark.
“We still need to stay on it and work hard in order to get better for tomorrow,” he said.
“The weekend is still long. From Friday to Saturday we see teams making a jump in performance.
“It’s going to be tight tomorrow as always. I don’t expect us to have the gap that we’ve had today, so we’ll have to do everything perfect. If the feeling is there, I’m sure we’ll do a good job in Q3.”
Ferrari looked quickest in the race simulations, but Vasseur noted that a red flag in FP2 for Franco Colapinto disrupted the rest of the session, including the long runs.
“We were not able to do a proper long stint — and it was in traffic, we had to slow down and so on,” he said. “It means we don’t have a good read of the tyres for the race, but I think it’s the same for everybody. Let’s see.”
But you also get a sense Ferrari is working hard to manage expectations at a weekend being billed as indicative of its capacity to fight for the title.
Asked if his team would contend for pole, Vasseur offered only: “Perhaps.”
McLAREN CLOSEST BUT NOT CLOSE ENOUGH
McLaren is hoping to reignite its title defence with a big upgrade package this weekend.
So far the results are inconclusive.
On the one hand, Norris was best of the rest behind Ferrari. The reigning champion was the only driver to run the new upgrade package, with reserve driver Leonardo Fornaroli in FP1 and then Oscar Piastri in FP2 running the old car in a back-to-back test to help validate how the new package was working.
But on the other hand, the car was half a second adrift of Ferrari.
That equated to a difference of 100.6 per cent — or 0.48 seconds over a normalised 80-second lap.
That’s not especially impressive — in fact it’s slightly worse than its average deficit to Mercedes over a single lap all season.
But as is often the case when teams bring big upgrade packages, Friday practice is more evaluative rather than being about pushing to the limit, and McLaren feels the new car is working as expected.
The gap between Norris and Piastri could be indicative here.
While Norris in his upgraded car was third and half a second off, Piastri was almost 0.9 seconds slower down in eighth in the old machine.
Piastri will get the new car from FP3 on Saturday.
The 0.9-second margin will not be all down to the pure performance of the package, but as Ferrari demonstrated, more downforce pays double in Hungary by keeping the tyres fresher for longer.
Piastri was a match for Norris until the final sector, where it looks like he runs out of grip.
Built into that margin too is that Piastri gave up FP1 for Fornaroli, something each driver has to do twice a season.
It bit hard given the blustery and low-grip conditions of the circuit on Friday.
“Very, very challenging for sure,” Piastri said. “It’s very windy. The new parts of the track are not very grippy and not breaking apart but they’re very worn, so it’s just a very challenging circuit at the moment, and obviously missing a practice session has made it pretty tough.”
“We’ll see what it’s like on my car tomorrow, and hopefully we can have a successful day.
“I think if we execute a good day, it seems like there can be a lot up for grabs.”
WHAT HAPPENED TO MERCEDES?
Ferrari’s pace was unsurprising, but Mercedes’s struggles were a shock.
George Russell was 0.933 seconds off the pace down in fifth and never looked like a threat.
The caveat here is that title leader Andrea Kimi Antonelli didn’t get a representative lap in on softs. His first attempt was called off when the red flags flew, and a wild oversteer moment at the chicane forced him to abandon his lap and move on to long-run simulations, leaving him out of position in 13th.
Antonelli skipped FP1 for reserve driver Frederik Vesti, but given the Italian has generally had the pace on Russell this season, it’s not crazy to think Mercedes should have been a little closer, but even then the gap is still huge.
“Our single-lap [pace] didn’t look great,” Russell said. “The long run looked more competitive, but what we potentially feared with Ferrari seemed to be the case. They look very, very strong.”
But like Piastri, Russell also noted the unusual conditions and, in particular, the resurfacing work that isn’t to every driver’s satisfaction.
“It was quite a strange day out there I think for everybody,” he said. “Budapest is an amazing track to drive, but they’ve resurfaced half the track — super bumpy, a lot of it is breaking up around the last couple of corners, which is making it quite strange to drive on.”
Various parts of the track between the first turn and turn 12 have been resurfaced ahead of this weekend as part of general upgrade works to the venue in recent years.
The change in grip conditions is one element of the challenge.
A second seems to be the bumpiness of some of the work, with some drivers radioing during the session that their cars were set up too stiffly. We also saw lots of locking up on the brakes indicative of the rough road.
But concerns about the track breaking up are more concerning.
It was just earlier this year that the Monaco Grand Prix was affected by a new surface deteriorating late in the race. It played a role in two crashes, causing a red flag.
Track conditions obviously aren’t a uniquely Mercedes problem, but as every team tries to work out how to close the gap to Ferrari, knowing that part of the track will get worse rather than improve, as would normally be the way over the weekend, will make the task trickier.
ASTON MARTIN’S BITTERSWEET BIG DAY
How important is this weekend to Aston Martin, Formula 1’s big-bucks struggler?
“The first races have been a complete nightmare,” team boss Adrian Newey said.
“Hopefully we can get at least a point and respectability now; I think that is the immediate goal.
“From there, we can try to keep moving forward.”
Aston Martin declared 16 upgrades to its car, many of which included multiple parts packaged together.
Almost every bit of the AMR26 is new, the result of the team pooling its resources into one by update rather than having made piecemeal changes to its disastrous car through the season.
The biggest change is weight — the car is tens of kilos lighter, which is essentially free lap time. Here was always going to be a meaningful gain.
But the aerodynamic changes are clear to the eye — and they’re only the first stage of what Newey said is a three-phase upgrade that will be completed at the rounds after the break in Zandvoort — where Honda will also bring a new engine — and Monza.
So what was the result?
Lance Stroll completed only half of FP1 before retiring with a rear suspension failure. The team didn’t have enough spares to repair his car, so he sat out FP2, but new parts are being flown from the UK to get the Canadian out for FP3.
Fernando Alonso ended FP2 19th and 2.99 seconds off the pace.
It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a big step — and also undersells the gains.
If that gap were to remain unchanged by qualifying, it would be Aston Martin’s third-best one-lap result of the season behind only Miami and Canada back in May.
However, Alonso has a faster time deleted for track limits at the final corner that would have put him 17th, in the mix with Williams.
That time was 2.619 seconds off top spot. If he were to replicate that margin in qualifying, it would be Aston Martin’s best result of the year by far.
Normalising all the circuits to 80 seconds to better compare them, it would represent a gain of 1.8 seconds over its average deficit from the last three rounds.
That’s just from the first package of upgrades and without the new engine — and without the team pushing hard given the importance of understanding the massive upgrades and working on set-up.
“It was much better — much better,” Alonso said. “The car felt more glued to the ground and easier to drive to an extent.
“It’s more or less what we expected, which is the most encouraging thing — that what we thought the new package will do to the car actually translates into reality on track.
“That kind of correlation is what we need also for next year’s project.
“Step by step, but definitely in the right direction.”
If the team finds a step overnight, it could even be dreaming of its first Q2 appearance of the year — unimaginable just a week ago.
But one step at a time.
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