A Hot Practice Day At The Hungaroring For Honda Power #F1
HungaroringRed Bull Racing showed solid pace and Scuderia AlphaTauri was also competitive despite a tough day of practice for Yuki at the Hungaroring.
In hot conditions, it was Max who set the pace in the first practice session as Red Bull Racing hit the ground running, edging out Valtteri Bottas by just 0.061s. Pierre also had a strong start to the weekend, ending up fifth quickest to ensure both Honda-powered teams were represented in the top five.
Sergio was a little further back in eighth place, while Yuki was 12th overall but suffered two incidents. The first was a small spin at Turn 9 when he overcorrected as the rear of the car tried to step out on him, but then when a similar moment occurred at the high-speed Turn 4 the overcorrection pitched him backwards into the barrier and brought out the red flags.
Yuki was unharmed in the incident but his car needed a lot of work to repair it, meaning he would miss the majority of the second session on Friday.
FP2 was slightly less successful all-round, with Max complaining of issues with his car’s handling but still third quickest, ahead of Sergio in fifth and Pierre in sixth. Even without a smooth day, the lap times are encouraging for both teams, and AlphaTauri worked hard to ensure Yuki could get back out on track with two minutes remaining and complete one flying lap, ending up 17th.
This weekend sees the usual race weekend format return after the first trial of the Sprint format at Silverstone, meaning we have one more practice session tomorrow morning to try and hone the cars and PU settings ahead of qualifying.
The first day of practice for the Hungarian Grand Prix featured very hot and sunny conditions with ambient temperatures over 30 degrees Celsius and the track getting past the 60 degree mark. Apart from Yuki’s crash in FP1, which cost him most of FP2 track time, the day went smoothly for us. It was good to see that Max is not suffering any ill effects from the Silverstone crash and we were able to check that the PU that he used in the British GP weekend is working as normal. However, generally, there is still a lot of room for improvement and that’s what we will be working on now. Qualifying has been very close at most circuits this year and, as is always the case on a short track like the Hungaroring, the lap times will be even closer than usual, so we can expect a very tight battle for qualifying tomorrow.
In general, it was not an easy day on track today, we had a few adjustments that we were working on from FP1 and FP2 that we need to look into, seeing what works and what doesn’t. There are a lot of things to analyse this evening but there’s nothing too big to overcome so I’m not worried. The track was very hot today, but it looks like there’s a bit of rain coming so that should make things interesting and I’m looking forward to it.
The car felt good over the longer and shorter runs today. I think there’s definitely time to be found, I was caught in some traffic during both sessions so I think there is still plenty to play for in qualifying tomorrow. With the weather conditions predicted to change over the weekend, there is a bit of an unknown, it may benefit some more than others so we will have to wait and see what happens. We’ve made good steps and we have a good idea about what we need to do before qualifying to make improvements, so I am optimistic for the rest of the weekend.
I’m very pleased with today, particularly after Silverstone where we struggled a bit. It’s good to see that we’ve got the performance back again. The car felt good even in these really hot conditions, so we’ll see how we do tomorrow. The Alpine car is looking very fast this weekend so we’ll have to work hard tonight to try and get them in Qualifying. I think it might rain overnight, and also in the morning, so we may have different track conditions tomorrow. The pace of the car seems to be good though, so we can go into tomorrow with confidence.
I’m really disappointed with today, I made a mistake in FP1 and it meant that I’ve lost more than a session’s worth of running. The rear of the car felt very nervous, especially in high-speed corners, and I was losing a lot of time there compared to Pierre. I was trying to improve in those areas, but I lost control of the car and I went into the wall. Unfortunately, the gearbox was damaged, and the team had to work really hard to get my car ready for the afternoon. The mechanics did a really good job getting the car fixed before the end of the session, so I was able to get one push lap in during FP2. It was really helpful for both the engineers and I to get this, so we can review the data tonight.
