Why Hungary won’t be the Monaco race F1 hoped for

Some Formula 1 teams are fond of describing the Hungaroring as 'Monaco without the walls'. There is some justification for this. It's a short and narrow track, with 14 turns - most of which are taken at less than 125mph, and a place where the cars run with all the downforce the teams can find.

"It's like Monaco," says Red Bull's Daniel Ricciardo. "You don't really have much time to think. It's just corner after corner. You can zig-zag your way around." We all know how May's Monaco Grand Prix panned out. Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull were all contenders for pole; Ricciardo eventually claimed top spot on the grid; and but for a pitstop blunder he would have narrowly beaten Lewis Hamilton to victory in the race too.

So you can see why both Red Bull and Mercedes came into the Hungarian Grand Prix weekend expecting another close fight. At 'Monaco without the walls', Hamilton, Mercedes boss Toto Wolff, and even McLaren's Jenson Button reckoned Red Bull would have a genuine shot at victory.

But this will not be Monaco. Not even close. Mercedes looks set to crush its opposition at the Hungaroring, with Nico Rosberg lapping almost six tenths faster than Ricciardo's Red Bull in Friday practice - a gap Ricciardo admitted was "genuine".

Rosberg led the next fastest car by about as much time as covered the entire midfield group, from Fernando Alonso's McLaren-Honda in seventh to Daniil Kvyat's 16th placed Toro Rosso.

PURE PACE RANKING
1. Mercedes (Rosberg) 1m20.435s
2. Red Bull (Ricciardo) 1m21.030s
3. Ferrari (Vettel) 1m21.348s
4. McLaren (Alonso) 1m22.328s
5. Force India (Hulkenberg) 1m22.449s
6. Haas (Gutierrez) 1m22.673s
7. Williams (Massa) 1m22.681s
8. Toro Rosso (Sainz) 1m22.689s
9. Renault (Magnussen) 1m23.347s
10. Sauber (Ericsson) 1m23.437s
11. Manor (Wehrlein) 1m23.992s

"I'm pretty happy with how today went," said Ricciardo. "Of course we'd like to be a bit closer to Mercedes, but we're more or less where we expected to be.

"We knew we'd be close with Ferrari. If we can stay just behind Mercedes that's probably what we hope and expect for now."

What we don't know is how much faster Hamilton may potentially have gone, on a circuit where last season he was significantly stronger than his Mercedes team-mate.

Hamilton now has some serious work to do, after losing most of his second practice session to a crash at Turn 11 after getting caught out by a kerb.

He still ended up fifth fastest - within a second of the Red Bulls and Sebastian Vettel's Ferrari - despite not using the super-soft tyre. That's ominous in itself.

He will have to rely on his team-mate's data from the longer runs, which make for even more frightening reading for the rest of the field.

Rosberg had more than a second per lap in hand, on average, on both the super-soft and soft tyre compounds. This suggests the Hungarian GP will be closer to Baku territory than Monaco, and that this is unlikely to be anything other than a two-horse race between the Mercedes drivers.

This is a disappointing prospect for all who hoped Mercedes might face a genuine challenge here. Rosberg did most of his damage over a single lap through the first sector (three straights linked by two long-duration slow corners and a fast kink), and the rest in sector three (two more looping slow bends, a 90-degree left-hander and some shorter straightline sections).

Ricciardo was fractionally faster (by 0.025 seconds) in sector two, which is the most Monaco-esque part of the circuit.

If the whole track was like sector two this might be close run thing, but in actual fact Rosberg's average lap speed in second practice was 122mph. That's 21mph faster than F1 cars lapped Monte Carlo in qualifying earlier this season, and just 5mph slower than they went around Barcelona's Catalunya circuit.

To put this in greater context, the average speed of Lewis Hamilton's Q1 lap in Malaysia last year was 125mph, while Rosberg's pole lap of Abu Dhabi's Yas Marina circuit at the end of last season was clocked at an average speed of 124mph.

So the Hungaroring, with its re-profiled kerbs and smooth new asphalt is actually a pretty quick circuit. Quicker than it looks certainly, and the faster the track the more Mercedes can generally rub its hands together in glee.

The absence of the ultra-soft tyre this weekend, a compoun that perplexed Mercedes in Monaco, will also help. Many drivers, not only at Mercedes, have generally found the super-soft easier to work with, and Hungary's hot weather and high track temperatures mean warm-up and graining are of no concern.

The game is simply about extracting that single-lap performance for qualifying then hanging on to the rubber as well as you can in the race.

Ferrari is usually quite good at the second part of this puzzle, but that will be of little use unless it can close the gap significantly in qualifying.

Ferrari knows its engine is not too far away from Mercedes, and the SF16-H has performed well on circuits with decent straights and lots of bumps and tricky kerbs.

Unfortunately, deficits in low-speed performance (evident in Baku) and overall downforce (particularly penalising at Silverstone) will probably hold Ferrari back here, though it helps many of the slower corners are of longer duration than the stop/start 90-degree bends of Azerbaijan.

The prevailing hot weather - so long as it remains consistent - should mean Ferrari avoids any untoward trouble with the Pirelli tyres too. Its longer run pace was pretty close to Red Bull's on the super-soft tyre at least, but with a degradation advantage, which should help strategically if it misses out in qualifying.

Sebastian Vettel was able to split the two Red Bulls in FP2, just over three tenths down on Ricciardo - most of which he gave up in the twists of sector two, where downforce and traction really count.

"We had to come in a couple of times and re-programme the car, so we lost a bit of the rhythm," said Vettel. "But the car felt fine and we can improve the set-up and find a better balance.

"It's not a surprise that Mercedes is good. We need to be better in sectors one, two and three - there is not one sector that stands out.

"I am not entirely happy with the balance, so naturally if the balance comes more together we can improve."

Improve yes, possibly by enough to squeak ahead of Red Bull, but not to beat Mercedes. For that to happen would require an implosion of the sort we saw on lap one at Barcelona, or at the start of last year's race, when Ferrari got the jump on both Silver Arrows off the grid and Hamilton went off on the first lap.

But you can't base an effective race strategy on such anomalies. Ferrari and Red Bull are realistically fighting for second place here. Mercedes should be comfortably down the road if it keeps things together.

This is not Monaco; this is Hungary, where bizarrely Mercedes is yet to win in the V6 hybrid turbo era. But it is more than likely to finally break that duck this weekend.