Ferrari completed a Friday clean sweep, with Carlos Sainz besting Charles Leclerc to top spot in second practice for the Singapore Grand Prix.
Championship leader Max Verstappen struggled, with he and Red Bull Racing teammate Sergio Perez languishing in eighth and seventh and more than half a second off the pace.
Ferrari expected a difficult weekend at the slow-speed Marina Bay track, but the scarlet cars were uncatchable on the soft tire during the first night session of the weekend. FP2 is the most important practice session of the weekend, being the only one run under lights and at roughly the same time as qualifying and the race.
Continue reading on RACERCharles Leclerc led a Ferrari one-two ahead of title leader Max Verstappen in first practice at the Singapore Grand Prix.
Leclerc assumed top spot at the end of the soft-tire runs in the second half of the afternoon session with fastest times in all three sectors. Sainz was late to set his fastest time on a used set of softs, the Spaniard getting to within 0.078s of his teammate.
Verstappen had something of a rough session, complaining of rough downshifts and excess oversteer. The Dutchman shipped most of his 0.126s deficit to Leclerc in the first sector but became progressively quicker as his lap continued and his tires came up to temperature.
Continue reading on RACERMax Verstappen has won his home Dutch Grand Prix on a chaotic mixed-weather afternoon for a record-equaling ninth consecutive race victory.
Verstappen started on pole position and held the lead off the line, but his win was far from assured by the time he got to the final corner, where the heavens had opened to dump heavy rain onto the circuit.
Though rain was on the radar, it hadn’t been forecast to arrive for another half-hour, catching teams and drivers by surprise. Barely a handful of drivers responded by pitting for intermediate tires immediately. Sergio Perez, having started seventh, was the first among those to enter pit lane.
Continue reading on RACERMax Verstappen claimed a comfortable victory from sixth on the grid at the Belgian Grand Prix ahead of Red Bull teammate Sergio Perez.
Perez had started from the front row and snatched the lead from polesitter Charles Leclerc at the end of the Kemmel straight on the first lap control the race early on. But Verstappen was already up to fourth by then, behind Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton, and the Dutchman was targeting the top step.
The championship leader bided his time to make his moves. On lap 6 he snatched third from Hamilton at the end of the Kemmel straight, and on three laps later he mugged Leclerc on the brakes to take second place around the outside of Les Combes.
Continue reading on RACERMax Verstappen dominated qualifying on a drying track for the Belgian Grand Prix but will cede pole position to Charles Leclerc thanks to a gearbox penalty.
Despite a Q2 scare that saw him barely scrape through to the pole shootout in 10th, Verstappen mastered the slicks-on-damp conditions of Q3 to take top spot by an imperious 0.82s. But the Dutchman must serve a five-place grid penalty for unsealing his fifth set of gearbox components, one more than allowed for the season, which will drop him to sixth on the grid and promote Leclerc to pole on Sunday.
“Last year I had more penalties and we could still with the race,” Verstappen said, recalling his drive from 13th to victory. “That’s still the target on Sunday.”
Continue reading on RACERCarlos Sainz topped the sole practice session for the Belgian Grand Prix in heavy rain as Formula 1 contemplates potential alternatives to running qualifying on Friday afternoon.
Rain fell constantly and with varying intensity through the sprint weekend’s only hour of practice, making it impossible to draw meaningful comparisons between the teams and drivers. Only 15 drivers were able to set a lap, but most were unrepresentative, with more than 10 seconds covering the spread.
Five drivers, including championship leader Max Verstappen, failed to set a time, with only a pair of installation laps to his name.
Continue reading on RACERLewis Hamilton says he’s been operating beneath his usual competitive standard despite not having the car to take the fight to the leaders.
The Briton beat Max Verstappen to a shock pole by just 0.003s on Saturday to set up a potentially fascinating battle, but a slow start opened the door to a bold move on the brakes by the Dutchman to assume the lead into the first corner.
Verstappen went on to claim a 33s victory, the largest since Hamilton won the 2021 Russian Grand Prix by almost a minute. Hamilton eventually trailed home fourth, 39s off the lead.
Continue reading on RACERMcLaren boss Andrea Stella is buoyed by McLaren’s second consecutive podium finish but isn’t willing to call his team a permanent front-running fixture without a bigger sample size of circuits.
The team is enjoying a powerful resurgence from the midfield into the leading pack thanks to a major three-part upgrade package, the first phase of which was brought to the car at the Austrian Grand Prix at the start of the month.
Lando Norris qualified and finished fourth at the Red Bull Ring before leading teammate Oscar Piastri to a 2-3 qualification and 2-4 finish at the British Grand Prix on the following weekend.
Continue reading on RACERRed Bull Racing team principal Christian Horner has lauded his team for breaking the 35-year-old record for successive victories previously held by McLaren.
Max Verstappen’s victory at the Hungarian Grand Prix was the 12th in a row for Red Bull Racing, dating back to last year’s season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, taking it one race clear of McLaren’s 1988 record.
The legendary 1988 McLaren MP4/4 won 11 straight grands prix in an almost perfect season in which Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost combined to claim 15 of 16 race victories.
Continue reading on RACERMax Verstappen has won his seventh successive grand prix in a masterclass performance at the Hungarian Grand Prix.
The victory was Red Bull Racing’s 12th in a row, eclipsing the previous record set by McLaren in 1988.
Verstappen started second on the grid alongside pole-getter Lewis Hamilton but wasted no time snatching the lead into the first turn. The Dutchman was daring on the brakes into the hairpin, defying a Hamilton squeeze to emerge from the apex with first place.
Continue reading on RACERDaniel Ricciardo outqualified teammate Yuki Tsunoda at the Hungarian Grand Prix, his first race back in Formula 1, but is keeping expectations in check for what he expects to be a grand prix of difficult lessons.
Ricciardo recorded AlphaTauri’s best qualifying result in five races when he put his car 13th on the grid in Budapest, a result that eclipsed all but one of predecessor Nyck de Vries’s Saturday performances.
It also put him four places ahead of new teammate Tsunoda, who was knocked out of qualifying in Q1, albeit with a time just 0.013s slower than the Australian in a super-tight session.
Continue reading on RACERMax Verstappen thinks his Saturday weakness could be a Sunday strength after missing out on pole by just 0.003s with chronic balance problems.
Since he first got in the car on Friday, Verstappen has looked uncomfortable with the set-up of his upgraded Red Bull Racing machine. He regularly radioed his team during practice to ask if there was a problem with his car to explain its seemingly random handling behavior, notwithstanding the weekend’s blustery conditions.
Budapest fans were subsequently treated to the rare sight of the Dutchman having to set a banker lap in Q2 after having an earlier lap deleted for exceeding track limits. RBR sent him onto the track out of sync with the rest of the field to ensure the lap was clean, an unusually cautious approach for the runaway championship leader.
Continue reading on RACERLewis Hamilton has praised the overnight work of his team to turn the car’s lacklustre Friday pace into a surprise pole-setting performance.
Mercedes ended Friday practice anchored to the bottom of the time sheet, with Hamilton 16th and teammate George Russell last. While the raw times were due to neither driver using the soft tire, Hamilton described the car as being “at its worst” at a track he has historically dominated.
“It’s night and day different today,” he said. “Literally we turned it up on its head. Yesterday the car felt terrible. The balance was all over the place. It was very, very difficult to extract any performance from it.”
Continue reading on RACERLewis Hamilton has set a new record for most poles at one racetrack by pinching the fastest time from Max Verstappen in a thrilling qualifying hour at the Hungarian Grand Prix.
The fight for pole was delicately poised at the end of the first laps of Q3. Verstappen had strung together a lap for provisional pole, but his advantage was a slender 0.126s ahead of Hamilton.
The Dutchman has been unhappy with the balance of his Red Bull machine all weekend, and that discomfort was evident at several moments throughout qualifying.
Continue reading on RACERFormula 1 will race at the Hungaroring until at least 2032 after the circuit secured a fresh contract extension to host the Hungarian Grand Prix.
The new deal, which adds five years to the track’s current agreement, comes after promises made by the track to undertake significant infrastructure upgrades, including the construction of a brand-new pit building.
Many of the track’s facilities date back to its first grand prix in 1986. The circuit will celebrate its 46th anniversary in 2032.
Continue reading on RACERLewis Hamilton bested Max Verstappen to top spot of an intriguing final practice session at the Hungarian Grand Prix.
Warm weather and a high track evolution following rain on Friday made the hour difficult to read, as did the ongoing effects of Pirelli’s reduced tire allocations for teams, which forced them to be more frugal with their run plans.
It took until the final 15 minutes for Hamilton and Verstappen to get to their soft-tire qualifying simulation laps, having spent the balance of the hour on the slower medium tire.
Continue reading on RACERCharles Leclerc doesn’t expect his strong practice pace to translate into a pole position challenge despite topping FP2 at the Hungarian Grand Prix on Friday.
Leclerc headed an unusual top 10 in Budapest, pipping McLaren’s Lando Norris by just 0.015s and Alpine’s Pierre Gasly by 0.232s. AlphaTauri, Haas and Alfa Romeo were also represented on the top half of the time sheet.
Meanwhile Max Verstappen was 11th, and both Mercedes drivers were locked in the bottom five.
Continue reading on RACERLewis Hamilton says his Mercedes car was “at its worst” on a difficult Friday afternoon at the Hungarian Grand Prix but apportioned some of the blame to Formula 1’s experimental tire rules in operation this weekend.
Hamilton finished the day an uncompetitive 16th and 1.06s off the pace. Teammate George Russell was last and 1.489s adrift.
Pirelli has temporarily reduced the number of sets of dry-weather tires available for each driver from 13 to 11 in a push to improve its environmental footprint and create more strategic jeopardy. Rather than the usual two hards, three mediums and eight softs available, each driver has been allocated three hards, four mediums and four softs.
Continue reading on RACER