Lando Norris and McLaren led the way on pure pace on Friday at Formula 1’s 2024 Hungarian Grand Prix, but a deeper look at the long-run times suggests Red Bull possesses a race pace advantage at this stage.
Red Bull also spent the day assessing the impact of its much-discussed engine cover cooling upgrade applied so far only to Max Verstappen’s car, while Ferrari too was working through what data it could on its reworked Barcelona floor amid Charles Leclerc’s disrupted day.
All that and more is included in our assessment of where things stand so far at the Hungaroring.
In FP1, sweltering temperatures were the most notable element – with track heat peaking at 59.1°C, which Pirelli claims is only topped in its historical F1 data by 60°C in the 2018 race here and the 61°C in FP1 at the 2016 Malaysian GP.
F1 got to glimpse at Verstappen’s heavily revised RB20 – minus the high-waisted cooling gulleys added to Red Bull’s package at the start of the year – when he headed out of the pits, while Perez continued with the team’s old design.
Red Bull motorsport advisor Helmut Marko would later claim “Checo has got the same upgrade as Max, but that one part [sidepod and engine cover] is the most obvious to see, so everyone thinks that he doesn’t have it”.
“But Checo has the rest,” Marko continued. “So the difference is marginal in terms of performance.”
Aston Martin also split its car specification in FP1, as only Fernando Alonso ran its raft of front wing, halo, floor, diffuser and beam wing updates (Lance Stroll got these for FP2). Here the Ferraris were fitted with the revised floors that the Scuderia hopes will cure the high-speed corner bouncing that has afflicted the SF-24s since Barcelona.
Carlos Sainz led the way in the day’s opening session, setting a best time of 1m18.713s to forge ahead of Leclerc, before Verstappen nipped in with a 1m18.989s to end up 0.276s down in second. Verstappen was, however, running used softs and so missing peak new tyre freshness, as he’d opened up on the softs when the Ferraris ran hards.
In FP2, Ferrari’s day took a downturn, as Leclerc caused a long red-flag period with his Turn 4 crash in the initial running on mediums. Running wide onto the exit kerbs at the fast left-hander unsettled his car and spun him off and backwards into the barriers on the track’s outside. After a 15-minute delay as the barriers were rearranged, the pack headed back out en masse on the softs, which meant Perez’s early session-leading 1m18.568s on the mediums was eclipsed.
First, Russell got ahead on a 1m18.294s, before Norris put in the day’s fastest time – these laps coming either side of a wild moment for Zhou Guanyu. He spun off at the same point as Leclerc, unsettled by Perez going slowly on the racing line ahead as Zhou turned in for Turn 4 and the Sauber narrowly missed the Red Bull. In FP1, Zhou had lost bodywork from his sidepod cooling elements.
Norris’s 1m17.788s remained unbeaten thereafter, as Sainz’s soft-tyre flier came in 0.397s down and Verstappen again ended up as second best – this time 0.243s adrift of a different adversary.
Verstappen shipped time to Norris in the first sector on their best FP2 times, but closed in with a purple middle sector before falling back again as his rear softs struggled to hang on through the final turns. The Dutchman also complained of a braking issue – “they’re not biting”, he reported over his team radio – early in FP2.
An oversteer snap exiting Turn 2 proved to be costly for Verstappen as, per the GPS trace data from the cars on Friday afternoon logged from FP2’s quickest laps, he went from just shading Norris ahead of the left-hander to being 0.25s down on the exit. This is essentially the same gap the world champion faced by the lap’s end.
Intriguingly, the Red Bull did not appear to be turned down so significantly on engine modes (with all the usual caveats on this area and practice fuel loads applying). Sainz’s Ferrari, however, was consistently clocked with a higher top speed at the end of the main straight in both FP1 and FP2, while in the latter Verstappen’s speed matched Norris’s. Typically, Red Bull’s engines run offset to all their frontrunning rivals in Friday practice.
At Mercedes, the team feels it is yet to find the balance sweetspot for the W15 over a single lap, but it is confident it can at least bother Red Bull and McLaren come qualifying.
Mercedes’ fastest FP2 lap – from Russell – also featured tyre temperatures being too low for the opening corners and Russell therefore shipping 0.3s of his 0.506s final gap to Norris’s best time by Turn 3 alone.
The pack then switched to the typical FP2-ending long runs.
In these, McLaren stands as an outlier – the orange team going alone in running the hard C3 tyres for FP2’s end.
Both Norris and Oscar Piastri ran the hards, with the former’s 1m24.300s average comparing favourably with Mercedes’ best average (from Russell) on the mediums. But in these (see below), Red Bull comfortably led the way on Friday afternoon.
*N/A McLaren
Perez clocked the times in the table above, but more impressive was Verstappen’s degradation curve on a 1m24.221s average that still has him better than any other driver on the mediums late in FP2.
Data Autosport has seen (corrected for fuel loads and engine mode settings) has Verstappen being able to recover pace in the later tours of his slightly longer nine-lap stint. This in borne out in the lap times, as the Verstappen was able to get back to a 1m24s-flat by his final race sim lap having started off in the low-to-mid 1m24s and got initially slower.
We can look to McLaren’s best medium tyre long average of 1m24.943s, from Norris, from late in FP1 as a comparison of sorts, but the very high track temperatures of that session explain the massive one-second difference to Red Bull’s best average in FP2.
Mercedes also provides an outlier with Hamilton’s soft tyre long run in FP2, which he had to do after flatspotting the set of mediums ear-marked for this run during FP2’s early stages, with a big moment at Turn 1 that had him in the runoff. Aston was the only other team to do a soft-tyre long run, via Stroll, which was 0.329s slower than Hamilton on average.
Based on the medium averages, Ferrari appears to have work to do given Sainz trails Perez by a hefty 0.766s margin overall. His longer stint length gives some indication on fuel loads, but what is more interesting is to look at the times clocked ahead by Pierre Gasly and Alex Albon for Alpine and Williams respectively.
Each starts off pushing hard but go onto severe degradation curves in the data Autosport has seen. However, the comparatively short practice race runs mean their averages are naturally elevated.
Yet over a real race stint such an approach would be severely punished, so it’s probably safer to look at the more gently-tyre-treated averages from Esteban Ocon (1m24.929s) and Logan Sargeant (1m25.132s) to see where these two teams stacked up on Friday. Things still look decent for Williams in that regard.
Red Bull took the same approach, with Perez pushing hard early in his long run and then his times getting slower, as the thermal deg – most notably on the front tyres here – bites. The teams are looking to see exactly how extreme the degradation problem is in the 2024 Hungary heat.
So far, a combination of all three tyre compounds hasn’t been ruled out for race strategies, but given the relentless heat this weekend, it would be logical to expect the harder compounds to make the bigger difference on Sunday.
It was therefore interesting to hear Marko tell TV crews that “if I take the long runs, then I guess it’s between McLaren and us”, based on the Friday showing.
“But if I’ve seen it right,” he added. “McLaren already has one hard tyre less and that can be a deciding factor again with the temperatures…”
Stacked against this, however, is the winning strategy from the 2023 event that was a medium-hard-medium.
