The first part of the Formula 1 season ended with a thrilling race in Hungary, which summed up the championship so far and effectively ended it as a competition. Max Verstappen took his eighth win in 13 races this year with a perfect run from 10th on the grid. It was the 28th win of the Red Bull driver’s career and might have been his best. His team boss Christian Horner acknowledged he was “up there”. Verstappen’s driving combined attention, control, aggression, mature race management and sheer pace in a performance that simply crushed his rivals, albeit with a big assist from a Ferrari team that once again looked to be shot in the legs. Ferrari turned second and third on the grid into fourth and sixth at the flag and pitted title contender Charles Leclerc in a strategy that left their rivals – and Leclerc himself – baffled. It wasn’t the first time this year and the result is that Verstappen leads Leclerc at the summer break by 80 points. Drivers just don’t come back from that deficit – and certainly not when they’re racing for a team that can’t seem to get out of its own way.
Champion performance
Verstappen’s run in Hungary summed up his season so far. He has been in excellent form all year, and if anything seems to have risen again from the already extremely high level he showed in his titanic battle with Lewis Hamilton last year. Horner puts it down to the weight he lifted off his shoulders by clinching the title. And indeed Verstappen seems to have eased up to another level so far. In Hungary, he was initially cautious off the line when he saw a gap closing in on him, then clinical in quickly gaining places, to find himself at the back of the first group within 12 laps of the start. Red Bull stopped him early to ensure he got ahead of Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes, but he then had to manage his pace in the second stint and not push too hard and close in on Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari ahead of third due to overheating. clutch that affected his shifts for the entire race. Just after the halfway mark, though, he was within a second of Sainz – and just over seven of Leclerc in the lead – when Red Bull went for the undercut again. It was the decisive moment of the race and the one in which Ferrari handed it to Verstappen. Trying to gain track position, they pitted Leclerc and put him on the hard tyre. But they hadn’t done their homework well enough. On Friday, in temperatures 14 degrees Celsius warmer than the cool and wet race day, Mercedes and a few other teams had struggled to hit the hot spots and Mercedes ended up not touching them in the race as a result. Naturally, Leclerc struggled to hold on immediately and Verstappen pounced. He passed Leclerc next time for the de facto lead – Sainz and Hamilton up front had to stop again. Even a spin in the penultimate corner next time out couldn’t stop Verstappen. He lost the lead, but regained it five laps later, and it was game over for the race, and possibly the championship. In the Red Bull pit, Horner did not expect the Ferrari to stop. “I felt Ferrari were on a different strategy at that point,” he said. “Obviously they looked for the bank position, but once they came in strong I felt a win was possible. “We expected them to be strong today, I think the temperature may have affected them quite a bit. They boxed in a corner strategically which opened things up for us.” Horner said there was “still a lot of racing to be done” this season, but he wasn’t fooling anyone. A second title is now in Verstappen’s hands. The weekend started with the announcement that Sebastian Vettel will retire from F1 at the end of the season
Red Bull and Verstappen imperial
Before the race, there was a series of events that summed up one of the key differences between Red Bull and Ferrari this season. In Ferrari’s defence, Red Bull were also considering the hard tire in the race. In fact, they had originally planned to start from that. But when Verstappen and team-mate Sergio Perez struggled for grip even on soft tires in the reconnaissance laps on the grid, they changed their minds. Verstappen said his most optimistic hopes before the race were for a podium. “We wanted to start hard,” he said, “but after the reconnaissance laps we were like, ‘We’re not doing that, we’re going soft.’ “It’s about the feeling you have to have and the confidence to make those calls, because everything was analyzed around the hard tire and we changed the strategy and went to the soft, we stayed calm even with some problems with the clutch and upshifts, the right calls, the right undercuts and we had the right tires on the car the whole time.” The same could not be said for Ferrari. After the race, team boss Mattia Binotto and Sainz both said they felt there must have been something wrong with the car’s set-up because it didn’t have the pace it had shown in Friday’s heat. Binotto argued: “The car didn’t perform well, and if it doesn’t perform well, it doesn’t make the tires work as well as it should, and certainly not the hard tires.” But he did not explain why, if that was the case, they chose to cover Verstappen and fit the hard tyres. Surely Leclerc didn’t want it. “I said I wanted to stay in the middle as much as possible,” said Leclerc, “but we pitted too early for the difficult and we have to understand why. “Stopping for the hard part was the turning point. We just have to get better. “I don’t think we should have reacted to Max. It was an avalanche effect and we lost more than we should have.” Binotto will need to improve Ferrari’s performance in the second half of the season
Could Leclerc have won?
Had Leclerc been out, the race would have been one of chasing Verstappen on fresher soft tires in the closing stages, and there is no way of knowing who would come out on top, although Mercedes boss Toto Wolff believed that Ferrari had dropped another victory away from home. “I don’t know what the reasons were, why they decided to drop the medium or not use the soft at first, but that cost them the win,” Wolff said. As it was, so bad were the hard tires that Leclerc was forced to stop again for softs 15 laps later. And even that might have been wrong. It put him behind Perez as well, when if he stayed out he could have stayed in front of him, although fifth rather than sixth would have been little consolation in the circumstances. It is not the first time that Ferrari’s strategy has been called into question this year. At both Monaco and Silverstone, they turned Leclerc’s lead into fourth. There have been races where Sainz has seemed to run strategy from the car, and he certainly questions what has happened. Leclerc tried to put a brave face on it, pointing out the huge performance step Ferrari has taken from 2021 to 2022. But he also admitted they have issues to fix. “As a team, looking at where we’ve come from in the last couple of years, it’s an incredible step forward,” he said. “On the other hand, there’s another step we need to take and we’re working on it. But I’m confident we will.” Binotto was then asked if he felt changes were needed after so many mistakes. “If we look at the balance of the season, there’s no reason to change,” he said. “We have to deal with what was wrong today, which means first understanding and then dealing and then coming back competitive. “We knew the hard wasn’t as great as the medium, but it should have been faster after 11 laps in the stint. And it was a 30-lap stint. It didn’t work out the way we expected. “We wouldn’t have fitted them if we’d known it was so bad today. The reason they didn’t work is back to explaining why the car wasn’t as quick as we hoped, so there’s something wrong with the car and the way we set it up for the conditions. today and we gave the tires a harder life.” Had they considered not responding to Verstappen’s stop? “We looked at it and discussed what would be best,” Binotto said, “and that was the choice we made, which was definitely not the right choice today.” Could Mercedes lead again this season?
Hopes are rising at Mercedes
It was a bad July for Ferrari. It started with the hope that, after a terrible run in May and June, they could salvage the championship battle, following Leclerc’s dominant victory in Austria. But in Britain, France and now Hungary, things have fallen apart for various reasons, and in the drivers’ and manufacturers’ championships it’s much closer to Mercedes behind Verstappen and Red Bull up front. George Russell and Mercedes couldn’t turn their glittering pole from Saturday into victory, but it was still a strong race for the team and the second in a row in which they finished second and third. By Sunday, they had come up with an explanation for their remarkable turn of speed on Saturday – it was the tires being in the perfect window and the Ferrari not, as Russell had suspected after qualifying. It was a prosaic explanation for a romantic story, but that’s how things are sometimes in F1. The race showed the true pace of the cars. Russell fought valiantly to keep the Ferraris at bay in the first stint, before succumbing to the inevitable after Leclerc over-ran his first pit stop and exited on fresher tyres. The team went as early as they dared with his second stop, but he still ran out of tires by the end, which allowed Hamilton to catch him and pass him after switching to the softs after a long middle stretch. Both drove great. There were questions, though. On Saturday, Hamilton had abandoned his final qualifying round when his DRS overtaking aid failed at the start. In hindsight, he regretted…
