A long, hot weekend in Budapest lies ahead at the Hungarian Grand Prix where a testing trial, heavy with import for the top teams is perfectly poised as they look towards what is set to be a fiercely competitive second half of the Formula One season.
Temperatures at the Hungaroring soared to 33C on Friday afternoon,piling the heat on top of the tension in an increasingly hard to predict battle which was scarcely imaginable earlier in the season.
When Max Verstappen and Red Bull opened with fours wins from five races it was impossible to ignore a sense of anticlimax as the Dutchman looked set to run away again unopposed.
Yet since the Miami GP in May this discouraging narrative has been torn up and F1 has a fight on its hands. McLaren’s resurgence helped Lando Norris to his debut victory in Florida, then Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc won in Monaco while, most recently, Mercedes too joined the party.
The upgrades they have brought since Imola have proved revelatory, with the team winning the last two rounds at Austria and Silverstone. Austria may have been fortunate, George Russell inheriting the lead and win after Norris and Verstappen clashed, but at the British GP, Lewis Hamilton won deservedly on pace.
Six drivers have won this season and while Verstappen remains in a commanding position in the championship, 84 points ahead of Norris, it is now clear he will have no cakewalk to the title.
With 12 races done and 12 to go Hungary, then, is the testing ground for how that competition might pan out. Mercedes have brought more upgrades here and how they perform will be indicative of how far their car has come. They expected to do well at Silverstone but the Hungaroring is a different prospect altogether.
Higher temperatures and a track that is fearsomely hard on the rear tyres, with a preponderance of low-speed corners, will expose any weaknesses their developments have not addressed. However if they are strong in Budapest, the team might genuinely consider they finally have the measure of their mercurial ride.
They have form here too. Before the recent improvements that enabled Russell to take pole in Canada and Silverstone, the only time they had claimed the top spot since the regulation changes of 2022 were both in Hungary – Russell in 2022 and Hamilton in 2023. Both times they were subsequently outpaced by Verstappen in the race but this time they have reason to believe that will not be a given.
Hamilton, buoyed by his win at Silverstone, his first for 56 races, reflected what was an understandable sense of optimism at Mercedes. “It’s game on,” he said. “We’re fighting, we’re chasing and we’re going to try and win as many races or compete for as many wins as possible.
“What we have shown over the past few races is that with determination, with real focus and just persistently chasing for perfection and improvement you can make a difference. We are united as a team and we are going to try and make sure we finish this season on a high.”
McLaren, in contrast, will consider they have underperformed of late. Norris and the team have held their hands up to minor errors that have cost him further potential wins, notably when the team’s strategy at Silverstone blew their shot at a one-two at their home GP. Their car is arguably now the quickest on the grid – exploiting it when they have the chance is paramount and Norris, too, was upbeat in Hungary.
“We’ve come off the back of a couple of tougher races and not ideal endings,” he said. “But I think in terms of our confidence-level as a team, it’s probably higher than it’s ever been.”
Perhaps the greatest focus however will fall on Red Bull. With their rivals now breathing down their necks, this race has a sense of make or break about it. The team have fast-tracked a major upgrade, originally planned for after the summer break, to be applied to Verstappen’s car this weekend and they are putting great expectation in it delivering.
Verstappen emphasised how significant the race was for many teams and noted that the Red Bull upgrade’s success was a potential turning point for the rest of his season. “For everyone, this is an important weekend,” he said. “If this [upgrade] is not giving us some good lap time, then I don’t know how the rest of the season is going to evolve.”
Mercedes, who use the CrowdStrike security system that suffered a global outage on Friday, had to manually address the issue on each of its computers before practice began in Hungary. They were able to deal with it and complete practice with what the engineering director Andrew Shovlin described as minimal, if not zero, disruption.
In the first practice session, Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz was on top, from Verstappen and Leclerc. In the afternoon Leclerc crashed, causing a delay of 15 minutes for barrier repairs. Norris was quickest, over two-tenths up on Verstappen, with Sainz in third. Russell was fifth and Hamilton seventh.
