Red Bull hung Verstappen out to dry

The Hungarian Grand Prix was the fourth Formula 1 race in a row where we had action more or less right through the field. From the lights going out until the chequered flag, the podium positions were always in question. But there's been one common denominator in all of those races, and his name is Max Verstappen.

After getting his first pole in 93 tries he made a great start and led pretty much from lap one until lap 67 - only relinquishing the lead during that spell when he stopped six laps earlier than Lewis Hamilton.

The unfortunate thing for Verstappen was that the race was 70 laps long. The writing was on the wall for a very close finish from the moment Hamilton pitted on lap 49 for medium tyres, given Verstappen was on old hards. Hamilton and Mercedes had nothing to lose given how far they were ahead of third-placed Charles Leclerc at the time, but Hamilton still had to produce the lap times.

When Hamilton was suddenly 1.5 to two seconds faster with 11 laps to go, it was more or less all over. At that point I was shouting at the TV for Red Bull to bring Verstappen in and fit a set of the soft tyres. Yes, he would have dropped to second about 10s behind Hamilton but he might just have had the tyres to take the fight to Hamilton on the last couple of laps. Instead, the team watched his lead diminish and its driver become, as Christian Horner put it, "a sitting duck". Then Verstappen did pit and got fastest lap by 1.4s.

By lap 59, Vettel's soft tyres had already done 19 laps so he was showing there was little risk in running long on them, but no - Red Bull hung Verstappen out to dry until it was too late

Sebastian Vettel was the reference that Red Bull should have been looking at. He ran very long for his first stint on mediums, stopped on lap 40 and fitted the soft tyres and he was showing that the pace difference to his Ferrari team-mate Leclerc, who was on the hard tyre, was going to be enough to catch him and probably overtake for that final step on the podium.

By lap 59, Vettel's soft tyres had already done 19 laps so he was showing there was very little risk in taking that strategy but no, Red Bull left Verstappen hung out to dry until it was too late.

Talking about Verstappen and the last four races, he has won two, finished second once and taken three fastest laps - which are each worth that extra point. Over these four races, he's the top points scorer:

That's very positive for both Verstappen and Red Bull, which has made significant progress since the Austrian Grand Prix upgrade improved the troubles it had been experiencing with the front wing under the new regulations.

But while Red Bull has found itself going in the right direction, Haas seems to be a bit lost. As most the teams head into the summer break they will have a good handle on their cars. But Haas's cars can be very competitive in one session, then fall away the next.

And to make it worse, the performance consistently falls away come race day, with the Hungarian GP proving to be another pointless exercise for the team as it continued this unusual move of having one driver in the latest version of the car and the other in the one used for the season-opening Australian GP.

The message doesn't seem to be getting through to the Haas drivers

Look at qualifying at the Hungaroring as an example. Kevin Magnussen, driving the latest-specification, set a time of 1m16.122s in Q1. Come Q2, just a few minutes later, he only managed a 1m17.081s and complained of having no grip from the tyres on both runs. His Q1 time repeated would have been enough to make it through to Q3.

Team-mate (words used loosely) Romain Grosjean has been using the car in its Melbourne spec since the Silverstone weekend early last month. The first race of the season was more than four months ago, and many hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars of development spend has been put in the bin since then. And Grosjean is happier with the old car.

He set a time of 1m16.978s in Hungaroring Q1, improving to 1m16.219s in Q2 then 1m16.013s in Q3, so the slope of performance improvement is in the correct direction. Yes, the top guys improved by more, but that comes from a team in Haas's position hanging it all out in the earlier sessions while the big boys know that a clean lap with no mistakes will get them through without difficulty.

Haas reckons the Melbourne-specification car is better in hot conditions, while the newer version likes cooler conditions - as well as having an advantage in slower corners. The big question is: why?

I have my theories, and it seems that it is all to do with how aerodynamically critical the underfloor is. It's not necessarily the underfloor itself that is causing the problem, it could be how the bargeboard area is generating the airflow that is providing the underfloor's performance. But in the end, it is an underfloor separation problem that increases with higher ambient or track temperatures.

More downforce will always make a car better in slower corners. The car's ride height is not as low as in fast corners, so the underfloor will not suffer from airflow separation problems. But the faster you go, the closer to the ground the underfloor gets and the more dramatic any airflow separation problems become.

As Haas is finding out, the problem crops up suddenly, which makes it very difficult to research. You can fit all the aero rakes in the world, but if you don't really know if you have a problem or not at any point in time, it becomes very difficult to identify one and rectify it.

Whatever is happening is likely happening to a much lesser degree even with the Melbourne underfloor. The current developments just increase that same problem.

The team's troubles will be compounded by how critical the current tyre is for generating surface temperature. But the tyre is a secondary problem and not the main cause.

When you have an aerodynamic problem that causes an imbalance in the car, all you can do as a driver is slow down and drive within that balance. Normally, it is the rear that will suffer from underfloor aerodynamic separation, which will mean the driver will lose confidence on corner entry and turn in that bit earlier. This, in turn, will induce more understeer problems mid-corner. In the end, this sliding will overheat the tyre and the problem will just escalate.

I have had a car that suffered exactly these problems. During pre-season testing it was very good and well balanced. We went off to the hotter tracks and the rear just wouldn't give the driver any confidence under braking and corner entry. The harder you pushed, the worse it got.

It was very difficult to identify where the problem was coming from as none of our 'tools' looked at the transient effect of the aerodynamics. But we made a very small modification to the diffuser and the car became a completely different beast.

Those problems are small in comparison to Haas's real issue of its two drivers wanting to drive on the same bit of track. Any team needs its two drivers to respect each other when racing, and while no driver likes to be beaten by their team-mate something has to give.

We had Sergio Perez and Esteban Ocon at what was Force India bouncing off each other, and I have had drivers at Jordan who drove into each other - Eddie Irvine and Rubens Barrichello at Turn 2 in Hungary in 1994 and Ralf Schumacher and Giancarlo Fisichella in Argentina in '97 spring to mind.

Those were both races where, as a team, we were on for decent two-car results but through driver selfishness lost out. As you can imagine, I wasn't too happy with the situation and made sure the drivers were well aware of that. But from the outside, it seemed the message wasn't getting through to the Haas drivers.

There were team orders used by Haas in the Hungarian race, with Grosjean letting Magnussen past. This was just after Magnussen had made a stop, and Grosjean showed he had been listening finally by immediately offering to let him past over the radio - so that's something.

They will be able to have a good think about it during the summer break. Some of it probably comes from the frustration with the car problems, but team and drivers need to stick together and rectify their problems otherwise they'll be stuck where they are. Ninth in the constructors' championship doesn't make for a very good pay day at the end of the season.

Talking of progress, one of the interesting things for me is how a team improves, or doesn't, over a race weekend. Taking Hungary and looking at each team's fastest single time in each session, with pole time as the reference of 100% pace, we get the following. These are listed in post-Hungary constructors' championship order.

Practice two was not really that representative, but Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull all started the weekend at a similar level. If you look at Q2, when the top three teams all ran the medium tyre, they were all still hanging on together as far as pace was concerned.

But when it came to Q3 and using the soft tyre, Ferrari dropped away. This is either because it runs less fuel in the earlier sessions, hasn't got the qualifying engine modes or more likely if you look at practice three and Q1 when again they were all on the soft tyre, it was just not quite as competitive.

I think Ferrari has too much understeer on the softer tyres. This is quite common and we know the Mercedes and Red Bull have a more grippy front end, especially around Hungary's long, 180-degree corners.

In the past, Ferrari used to make more of a step than most other teams between the Friday sessions and the Saturday sessions but that seems to have gone away this year. Either Ferrari is starting the weekend stronger and has less room to improve, or it is not benefiting as much from overnight simulation.

Perhaps when Antonio Giovinazzi and Daniil Kvyat were working in the Ferrari simulator they were doing a better job than this year's options? Whatever happens, it's been a disappointing start to the year for Ferrari. Who would have thought it could go 12 races without a win?

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