How Verstappen's Hungary F1 qualifying pain was his race day gain

The outcome of the Hungarian Grand Prix all boiled down to one event: what happened in the first corner. Largely dormant since 2021, the Lewis Hamilton-Max Verstappen rivalry resurfaced as the two locked out the front row, where Hamilton claimed his first Formula 1 pole since the two did battle amid the final year of the previous generation of cars.

If Verstappen suffered a repeat of his opening salvo in the British Grand Prix two weeks prior, Hamilton could theoretically employ the solid race pace present in the Mercedes, and realistically make life more difficult for Red Bull. Conversely, should the Dutchman get the upper hand into the tight opening corner, his hopes of delivering a 12th successive win for the Red Bull squad to break McLaren’s record-holding 11-race streak from 1988 would increase exponentially.

Naturally, with the way that 2023 has gone so far, it was no surprise that Verstappen collected the lead into the first corner and began his customary ride into the sunset.

In the end, it was almost too easy for Verstappen. When he crossed the line after 70 laps of the relentless Hungaroring – 12 miles northeast of Budapest – we had to wait 33.7 seconds before Lando Norris swept past the chequered flag for second. It represented Verstappen’s biggest margin of victory in a season that has yielded unprecedented dominance for him and his team.

Among the paddock, the hopes of a somewhat interesting race and a tete-a-tete battle were balanced precariously on that opening lap. Perhaps it was unrealistic, given the flaws that remain present in the Mercedes W14, to expect Hamilton to challenge Verstappen over the course of the full race, but a good getaway could at least account for a few laps of sabre-rattling before the inevitable struck. As it happened, Verstappen’s slam dunk took about five to six seconds after the race kicked off, as he got away strongly and drew level with Hamilton down the inside into the first corner.

“As soon as I released the clutch, I immediately felt like I had no wheel spin, not like I had at Silverstone,” Verstappen explained of his start. “I got a good run. Then I knew of course I had the inside, so I knew that was going to be my corner in Turn 1, we braked quite late. But then I just did my thing through Turn 2 as well.”

Hamilton, for his part, did not get a particularly clean start, giving Verstappen licence to exploit his own good getaway. The polesitter explained that he “got a bit of wheelspin” that left him “a bit compromised after that”, something of an understatement as he lost position to both McLarens in the opening corners.

Verstappen was ahead by the first corner and his victory charge never looked in doubt

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Norris attempted to track Verstappen and Hamilton ahead but was forced into lockstep with them on the outer reaches of the circuit, as they hit the brakes for the tight right-hand Turn 1. With plenty of free space on the inside to occupy, Oscar Piastri gamely placed his car close to the apex and came up for air with second place.

The moment of misery for Hamilton continued as Norris launched his McLaren around the outside into Turn 2, sitting pretty to slink past ahead of the subsequent right-hand bend. Explaining the move, Norris revealed that he made two clicks on his steering wheel to adjust his brake balance in anticipation of an assault, hoping for a reprieve after the first corner.

“I had a decent start, and kind of went with Max and Lewis, but I couldn't go to the right,” the Bristolian reflected. “I had a big slipstream, so I came pretty much halfway alongside Lewis. It’s tough to know what to do: if I brake early, then it's easy for the people to go on the inside of me.

“I just kind of had to brake where I wanted to brake and I tried to turn in, but every time I tried to turn in, Max was trying to turn in, Lewis was trying to turn in, and I got caught out – as simple as that. Oscar got through, which was great, but Lewis got through, which was frustrating. But then I
managed to stay on the outside, and I was a bit surprised because I would've thought he'd run me a bit wider. But he didn’t…”

Verstappen was starting to feel very comfortable, in a stark difference to his frustrations with the balance of his RB19 24 hours prior. In qualifying, Verstappen had been less than pleased with how his Red Bull felt, stating that it was “all over the shop”

It mattered little to Verstappen who, despite the efforts of Piastri to cling on, could build enough of gap without really breaking a sweat in the 29C heat, and diligently cleared DRS range before the end of the second lap. This offered the young Australian little chance of continuing his sudden burst of progress.

Verstappen hadn’t quite sauntered away in the opening flurry of laps, but saw fit to maintain the buffer while he set about drawing out his first stint on the medium compound. He eased into the race with the gait of a tennis champion taking on an unseeded hopeful at the first round of Wimbledon, batting away speculative groundstrokes from the baseline and seldom having to rush forward to the net.

By the close of the 17th lap, Verstappen was over eight seconds clear of Piastri and continuing to run unabated. With Piastri notionally in pursuit, McLaren elected to pit Norris and switch him onto the hard tyre, largely to cover the threat of a Hamilton undercut once Mercedes had called in the seven-time world champion a lap prior.

Piastri’s call for hard tyres thus came a lap after Norris had visited the pitlane, the consequence of which offered the Briton a chance to undercut his younger stablemate. And lo, it came to pass at the start of lap 19: despite Piastri’s two-second-dead stop, Norris cruised past into the opening corner and usurped track position at the expense of his team-mate.

Norris became Verstappen's chaser after performing a powerful undercut on Piastri at the first round of pitstops

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella underlined that the team did not set out to enact a swap between drivers, but that Norris’s out-lap was simply “super, super quick” – too much for Piastri to combat. As Norris racked up more laps with impressive pace having made the most of his new tyres, he had cut the arrears down to Verstappen to 5.2s once the leader enacted his own switch to hards. It took two laps for Verstappen to get the hard tyres properly fired up but, once they’d come into the right working range, the reigning champion began to rebuild his advantage as Norris settled in and started to manage his stint.

At this juncture, Verstappen was starting to feel very comfortable, in a stark difference to his frustrations with the balance of his RB19 24 hours prior. In qualifying, Verstappen had been less than pleased with how his Red Bull felt, stating that it was “all over the shop” in his efforts to secure a sixth successive pole. His leisurely Sunday afternoon drive was in direct contrast to that, and he suggested that the missing pieces over one timed lap had played in his favour over 70.

“We tried a few different things with the car in terms of set-up in qualifying, which probably worked very well for today,” he noted. “But we tried so many things throughout the whole weekend, and it never worked on one lap. So it might have also been that we just didn't make our tyres work well over one lap.

“In the race, everything heats up and it runs hotter for a long period of time. You need probably a very different balance for that and basically yesterday it was understeering a lot. Today it's warmer, ambient and track, so probably it all came to me anyway. And that's why I probably had such a nice balance today.”

“It's a trait that has been there this year that we perhaps focus more on the race than on qualifying,” proposed Red Bull team boss Christian Horner. “We've seen that at Silverstone, it was very, very tight with McLaren for pole. At Monaco and other slow speed circuits, only an outstanding lap from Max got us that pole that day. But the race pace on the Sunday has been very, very strong. That's where obviously the points are. And that's what we focus on.”

After half-distance, Verstappen’s lead was now looking cushy at 11 seconds, and circulating around a second per lap faster than his nearest rival. The race was against himself, and he continued to add to his increasingly unassailable lead while pushing the hard tyre stint as far as it could go.

Thanks to those efforts he hung it out until lap 51 before retreating to the pitlane to begin his final stint, much later than the cars that had once occupied the same postcode. On his return to the medium tyre, Verstappen got them fired up in short order. It was almost like entering a cheat code to wrap up the spoils early, and he threw down a 1m20.504s following his out-lap to bolt three seconds onto his lead in one fell swoop.

Picking up from where he left off on his middle stint, Verstappen was largely guaranteed a free hand to stick a second onto his buffer out in front for each following lap. The earlier laps had perhaps been conservative, but the Red Bull was now in its pomp and Verstappen’s dominance over proceedings in Hungary had built up considerably. Nobody had an answer, not even the vastly improved McLaren, and the Woking team could only claim ringside seats to watch Verstappen dispatch its 1988 record of 11 consecutive wins with consummate ease.

Having driven away from his rivals at will, this was Verstappen's most dominant Sunday performance this season

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

“We achieved history today, which is something very special for the whole team to achieve the record of 12 consecutive grand prix victories,” Horner crooned after the race. “It has taken 35 years, but we are a team that has managed to break that. Particularly with the quality of the opposition that we're racing against, it is a phenomenal achievement and one that the whole team can be just immensely proud of.

“It’s just the way that the team is working. I think that it's all about the details and I think we're leaving no stone unturned at the moment.”

When Norris was no longer considered a threat, McLaren had been looking to preserve a 2-3 finish in its desire to flank the surefire winner on the podium. The consensus among the field was to conduct a two-stop strategy, and Norris was asked about his preferred choice of tyre for the final stint by engineer Jose Manuel Lopez – thinly veiled as Plan A and Plan C over the radio. Having felt that the hard tyre was “not too bad, but not that great”, he pitted at the end of the 44th lap to claim a lightly used set of the medium compound.

This was in response to the ensuing battle behind him, as Sergio Perez’s alternate strategy had brought him well and truly into the fight for the podium. The Mexican had started from ninth on the hard tyre and, after making his way past the Ferraris, had made his way onto Hamilton’s tail during his second stint. His medium tyre versus Hamilton’s hard tyre was working well, but the polesitter was willing to defend for all his worth.

"I don't think we expected to be here this weekend, especially in P2. Both Red Bulls are way quicker. So the expectation to be ahead of them is, like, basically a zero straight away" Lando Norris

The two were also reeling in Piastri, prompting the McLaren driver to pit for mediums on lap 42. Perez followed him in, attempting to secure the undercut on Hamilton, who persisted with the hard compound. Piastri emerged ahead, but Red Bull’s 1.9s service on Perez’s car very much left the 2021 F2 champion vulnerable. Perez made his way through on the 47th tour at Turn 1, despite Piastri’s efforts to fight back that left him briefly flailing around on the outside kerb at Turn 2.

Explaining Piastri’s drop in pace, Stella explained that damage to his MCL60 was sapping rear downforce and producing greater tyre wear that had to be managed through the final stint. In the meantime, Perez had collected fourth – which became third when Hamilton eventually pitted – and was conscientiously closing the gap to Norris in his efforts to secure a Red Bull 1-2.

Lapped traffic then came into play, much to Norris’s consternation. Upset at Yuki Tsunoda’s apparent inertia in responding to blue flags, Norris watched his gap over Perez shrink from over eight seconds to just over three. Clearing the AlphaTauri helped Norris to stabilise, however, and the AT04’s dirty air stopped Perez from making further inroads. There was perhaps an audible sigh of relief in the Norris camp when his gap started to pick up once again as Perez tried to navigate the backmarkers, which was just enough to preserve second place.

“I don't think we expected to be here this weekend, especially in P2,” Norris admitted after the race. “Both Red Bulls are way quicker. So the expectation to be ahead of them is, like, basically a zero straight away. Mercedes were on pole here last year, and their car has been pretty good. I know Lewis complains a lot of how amazing our car is and how bad [the Mercedes] is, but they don't have a bad car.”

Perez tore through the field from ninth on the grid but didn't have enough pace to catch Norris at the finish

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Having stopped seven laps later than Piastri, Hamilton had fresher mediums to take the fight to the second McLaren and dispatched him on lap 57. When Perez came across the lapped runners, Hamilton enjoyed a sudden flurry of progress and proceeded to hack away at the gap in the hope of securing a last-gasp podium.

Of course, Hamilton soon came across the traffic himself, but the Mercedes was shining in the late-game and he was seemingly able to clear it with far greater ease than Perez ahead. With two laps remaining, Hamilton was 1.9s behind Perez and still catching, but the final second-and-a-bit proved the hardest to overcome – and, despite his best attempt, it proved insurmountable and Perez kept his place on the podium.

Mercedes boss Toto Wolff reckoned that more could have been on the cards for Hamilton, but explained that the team’s overcautious approach to bringing the tyres up to temperature left time on the table.

“We were too careful in bringing them in,” the Austrian mused. “I think after the stops, we lost a lot of time, and it paid off towards the end of the stint because we were miles quicker than everybody else. But it's always a balance and I believe the balance was a little bit too much in terms of bringing them in.

“You can see that in the second stint as well, where we lost a lot of time at the beginning and gained massive chunks back at the end. But that's a balance we need to look at, to strike that balance right.”

Remarking on Verstappen’s triumph, Wolff reckoned that it was equivalent to an F1 car battling against the rest of the “F2” field, but conceded that it was a “meritocracy” and that the job Red Bull had done should be acknowledged by the rest of the teams. He was right; that Red Bull could clinch its 12th successive win and continue its monopoly on victories in 2023 underlines the excellence in engineering that persists within the Milton Keynes factory.

For a driver to win by over 33 seconds is pure, unadulterated dominance. That Red Bull can pull out that kind of an advantage in a ruleset that’s never been more tightly regulated, however, is something that far transcends simple dominance. McLaren’s streak in 1988 was ended by Ayrton Senna’s tangle with Jean-Louis Schlesser at Monza; it would have secured a full house otherwise. Once again, force majeure seems to be the only factor that can stop Red Bull.

Verstappen with his winners' trophy that was broken by Norris - probably the only thing that went wrong all day

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images