The 10 reasons why the Hungarian GP was so good

The Hungaroring had held 38 Formula 1 races. Some have been utter stinkers. Others, total thrillers. And, although McLaren scored a 1-2 from a front row lockout – Oscar Piastri leading home Lando Norris to score his first grand prix victory in the 39th contest – this was certainly the latter.

It was a contest bursting with narratives. At every stage, something enough to fill a 3000-word race report alone on other more predictable days occurred. That’s what made it so compelling. The emotional core of many of these elements only enhanced everything.

Here we present the 10 key factors that made the 2024 Hungarian GP so good.

1. Start saga transforms Piastri and Verstappen races

Verstappen's efforts to go around the outside of Norris at the start, rejoining ahead via the runoff, forced him into giving up the place and pursuit of Piastri

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

The McLaren drivers had Max Verstappen starting third. When the lights went out, Norris reacted well enough, but then, he later revealed, “something happened on my second shift and I lost all my momentum”. As a result, Piastri came steaming up alongside.

Norris squeezed the other MCL38, but Piastri just had to straddle the white line wide of the pitwall before Norris jinked back left. Rapidly, it was time to get in position for Turn 1’s braking point, where Verstappen was suddenly Norris’s most pressing concern.

Verstappen had braked latest of the trio and as a result, his nose tip was fractionally ahead as they swung right to the hairpin’s apex. This is critical in F1’s 2024 racing guidelines but just wouldn’t have been possible without the big run-off area to his left. Because, tight on the inside, Piastri was understeering towards Norris, who had nowhere to go.

It’s remarkable they all made it through without contact, with Verstappen scampering onto the run-off without hesitation in a move that a cynic might argue had pre-planned whiff – rejoining ahead of Norris as Piastri pushed his inside line advantage to seal the lead.

At Turn 2, Verstappen defending the inside against Norris and then super-aggressively covering off the outside line against Lewis Hamilton, allowed Norris to power back against the Mercedes around Turn 3 and chase on after Verstappen and Piastri. At the end of lap one of 70, the brutal early exchanges had handed Piastri a 1.6-second lead.

Immediately, Norris was crying foul about Verstappen’s run-off tactics, while the Dutchman in reverse felt he’d been pushed wide. When the incident was quickly referred to the stewards by race control, Red Bull reckoned “at that point the feeling is that you're probably going to get a penalty”, per team boss Christian Horner.

Therefore, on lap four, Verstappen pulled over heading towards Turn 2 and allowed Norris back by. Verstappen initially fumed about having to act before the officials ruled, but post-race he reckoned, “looking back at it, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because they were quite a bit faster”.

At the end of this tour, Piastri’s lead stood at 2.3s. His chances of victory had been transformed, as now he was in the perfect place to benefit as the lead car in terms of strategy calls (logically, at least!) and also didn’t have to cope with the considerable dirty air factor. This would increase sliding for chasing cars and spike temperatures through the tyres each time in what was another tricky thermal degradation race in sweltering temperatures at Budapest.

2. Verstappen’s car handling hatred

Verstappen was already struggling for balance before losing ground by being overcut

Photo by: Lubomir Asenov / Motorsport Images

All of this was becoming critical in the reverse way for Verstappen in third. Here, the teams are forced to set their cars up to understeer via dialling down front wing settings to protect the rear tyres as much as possible from all that sliding across long stints. It has long been known how much Verstappen detests such a handling trait.

He was running Red Bull’s most significant upgrade of the season – aimed at boosting performance on high-downforce layouts such as this and also giving the “very peaky” car, per Horner, a wider set-up window to chase the best through-corner balance.

Things had looked good on this front in the similarly scorching FP2 race simulations, where Verstappen felt he’d had “a good day with the upgrades”. Then in qualifying’s cooler conditions he was suddenly struggling more with oversteer in the higher-speed corners as the extra front wing he’d felt comfortable taking considering the upgrades’ boost compared to normal suddenly made the car overly pointy.

On race day, the track was “really hot and as soon as you get close to cars the tyres overheat and basically all of the advantage that you have with the tyres is not working anymore”, Verstappen explained.

By lap 15, Verstappen was 6.8s off Piastri’s lead – Norris having dropped back to 3.4s behind his team-mate at this stage. Here, Red Bull asked Verstappen for front wing angle change advice, but he reckoned “it’s on the low side, but only way I can survive” on rear tyre wear, with his machine again “understeering and oversteering”.

What had looked ominous when Red Bull’s Friday evening long-run average came in 0.361s a lap quicker than anyone else (albeit on the mediums all the leaders would start the race on versus the hards the McLarens ran late in FP2) suddenly looked awful.

“I felt it coming,” Verstappen replied when asked if his pace had been worse than feared pre-race. “Today was also hot again and when you don’t have a good balance you cannot look after the tyres and that’s the problem.”

3. Red Bull’s strategy errors count

Hamilton's early first stop caught Red Bull by surprise, and forced it into going longer in the hope of creating an offset, but it admitted to underestimating the scale of advantage needed

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

Verstappen was about to encounter another. On lap 16, with Piastri’s lead 3.5s over Norris and Verstappen 4s further back, Hamilton pitted to move to the hard tyre. He’d been “really surprised to see that I was able to hold on to Max” and “wasn't even having to push too hard to stay around a second behind him”.

“Lewis with his two sets of hard tyres [Verstappen had just one and the McLarens only a used set of this compound] went very early,” Horner reflected. “We were considering going that early, but at that point you're racing for third. And with the two hard tyres, he had the ability to shuffle his race that early.”

With the considerable undercut power, Red Bull knew Mercedes had snookered Verstappen on track position and so, Horner said, decided to “go longer, give an overlap advantage” to its world champion. That meant staying out until lap 21, by which time Norris had been called in to cover Hamilton (from that 3.5s adrift of Piastri and so in no danger of undercutting ahead) before the leader came in too on the 18th tour.

Once on the hards, “Max was competitive” – again per Horner. He added: “He was strong, certainly compared to McLaren.”

Verstappen was able to run in the mid-to-high-1m22s as the leaders initially stayed in the low 1m23s at the start of the middle stint. The gap between the McLarens grew to 4.4s over the next 14 laps, while Verstappen “caught Lewis quickly”. “And then unfortunately in the dirty air got we stuck as Lewis started to really drop off,” Horner continued.

Here there was a second factor Red Bull felt it got wrong last Sunday. This was how “we underestimated the delta you need for overtaking”, according to Red Bull motorsport advisor Helmut Marko.

4. Piastri’s mistakes make a critical difference

A commanding lead for Piastri was trimmed by a Turn 11 mistake in the second stint, allowing Norris to get within range of an undercut pass

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images

Starting lap 33, with Verstappen still tucked up behind Hamilton, Piastri led by that commanding 4.4s and feeling “very evenly matched” with the chasing Norris. Then, the next time by, Piastri lost nearly 2s correcting a rear snap that had him totally off the road, wrestling his steering wheel dramatically, exiting the fast Turn 11 right.

He said replied unconcernedly “yep” to engineer Tom Stallard’s enquiry afterwards, but it took him seven tours to return to his previous pace in the 1m23s and the gap even came down to 1.3s on lap 37.

Piastri also nearly dropped his car in the new-for-2024 gravel strip at the outside of the 90-degree Turn 12 right-hander on his first lap after his second stop. He then dipped his left-rear into the same spot on the last lap too.

“I'm very, very happy with the result, of course, but in terms of leaving the weekend, with the question of, ‘Am I fully satisfied with my performance today?’ No, I'm not,” Piastri would later assert. “There's still things I want to improve.”

5. Ferrari poses a surprise threat

Leclerc was unable to use his much fresher tyres as he became stuck behind Verstappen, prompting Ferrari to commit to an undercut after a short second stint

By lap 45 and Piastri re-establishing a 2s lead, a new name had entered the fray. Somewhat surprisingly given how bad things have been for Ferrari lately, this was Charles Leclerc.

Having started behind team-mate Carlos Sainz, Leclerc steamed around the outside to gain at Turn 1 and from there fell to a 2s chunk behind Hamilton until the Mercedes pitted in the first stint.

Leclerc then came in two laps later than Verstappen and his pace on the hards was then so good he was able to cruise up behind and threaten the frustrated Red Bull driver in a manner not seen for the Scuderia since late May’s Monaco round.

Having built and unleashed the advantage of a tyre life offset with his metronomic pace in Leclerc’s long opening stint, Ferrari was “expecting to do a longer one” while running the hards – according to team boss Fred Vasseur. “But we got stuck behind Max,” he added. “You try to do the undercut, we did it, but Hamilton pitted the same lap as us and we were a bit stuck behind him at the beginning of the stint.”

Indeed, the pair came in for their service on lap 40, Hamilton sticking with his second set of new hards and Leclerc going back to the mediums. Again, Verstappen had been undercut.

“The wrong strategy calls put me on the back foot where I constantly had to fight people, trying to overtake, and it didn’t work,” he said.

6. McLaren’s second stop strategy dilemma

An earlier stop for Norris gave him the lead, but that wasn't in the script for McLaren

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

At this point, the choice was easy for Red Bull – again, Verstappen had to go long and fight back. Just before the second stops, Piastri had a 10.1s lead over Hamilton, with Norris 8.8s ahead of the seven-time world champion.

McLaren waited another five laps before making a call because “we didn't want to pit too early”, per team principal Andrea Stella, as “the tyres were degrading a lot and we didn't want to run out or tyres should Verstappen become a problem at the end of the race”.

But when an MCL38 did finally head for the pits again, it was Norris’s. Explaining this, along with the point above, Stella said: “You need to go safe from a pitstop point of view. Do you want to pit only when you have three seconds [from Hamilton to Norris]? Because then all the pressure goes on the pitcrew.”

McLaren feared the rate at which Hamilton was catching Norris on his latest new hards (1.3s a lap and with just 5.5s to separate them once the 20s pitlane time loss had been considered on lap 44). Therefore, it opted to bring Norris in first and avoid the gap closing to around those three seconds if he’d been serviced on lap 46 and not lap 45.

Piastri said he was told “Lando was boxing early to cover Lewis, and I was going long to cover Max, essentially, because I knew that he'd stop later, and I think we were just being very safe”. But that meant Norris undercut his way into the lead when Piastri came in at the end of the 47th tour. A lot of angst followed.

7. Norris’s inner conflict is aired widely

Norris was consistently asked to give up his position to Piastri, but took a long time to comply

Photo by: Lubomir Asenov / Motorsport Images

At the end of following lap, Norris had a 3.4s lead over Piastri, with Verstappen still yet to pit again ahead. As he’d passed by his pitting team-mate, Norris’s engineer Will Joseph almost nonchalantly stated: “We'd like to re-establish the order at your convenience.”

Piastri’s out-lap gravel moment had cost him an extra 0.3s and from there, the gap between the two team-mate’s shrank for a little while before ballooning. Joseph was therefore left to implore Norris to consider giving up the lead, after his call five laps into Piastri’s final stint (the 53rd tour) to check his charge’s radio was still working. The reply: “Loud and clear.”

Joseph’s concern over Norris’s tyre management in the critical fast Turns 4 and 11 points betrayed McLaren’s mounting fear: that Norris might insist on trying to win and destroy his second set of mediums in the process.

Lap 56, Joseph: “We need you to save tyres, and we want to let Oscar through.”
Norris: “Um, well you should have boxed him first then, surely?”
Joseph: “Doesn't matter.”
Norris: “It does. For me, maybe.”

Soon Joseph was almost pleading for Norris to obey the call – his messages getting more and more emotional. From “I know you'll do the right thing” on lap 56 when Norris’s lead was 3.5s, to “just remember every Sunday morning meeting we have” on lap 61, to “he can't catch you up – you've proved your point and it really doesn't matter” three tours later. This continued:

Lap 64, Joseph: “We did this stop sequence for the good of the team.”
Norris: “Yeah and I'm fighting for this championship.”
Joseph: “I'm trying to protect you, mate.”

On lap 66, with Norris 6s ahead, Joseph said: “The way to win a championship is not by yourself – you're going to need Oscar and you're going to need the team.” But his call the next time by “if there's a safety car now, it makes this very awkward, please do it now” finally did the trick.

As lap 67 turned into lap 68, Norris pulled over and let Piastri back ahead. “Priority number one, is think of yourself,” Norris later said. “I'm also a team player, so my mind was going pretty crazy at the time.”

8. Verstappen’s radio fury adds to the drama

Verstappen quickly closed in on Leclerc after losing out in the pits, and reacted angrily when his engineer said he'd not been gentle enough with his mediums

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Having come out from his second stop at the end of lap 49 facing a 15.2s gap to first and 4.9s to Leclerc, Verstappen quickly reached DRS range of the Ferrari. To this point, he’d had considerable team radio airtime too – spouting off to the FIA via Gianpiero Lambiase after giving Norris second back, and complaining about his brakes as the first stint ended and while being rebuffed by Hamilton in the second.

Then he was sarcastically saying “it’s quite impressive how we let ourselves get undercut… it’s completely f***** my race”. In the final stint back on mediums, Red Bull’s ice cool chief engineer had drily noted “that’s some gentle introduction” amid the need to avoid taking tyre life with fast laps early in each stint and Verstappen simply raged in response: “No, mate, don’t give me that bull**** now. You guys give me this f***** strategy… I’m trying to rescue what’s left – for ****’s sake.”

Perhaps the most intriguing line was Lambiase’s “childish” comment after the race’s other moment of great drama. But Horner insisted afterwards: “GP at that point actually wasn't referring to Max – he was referring to others on the radio complaining about penalties.”

9. Another Verstappen/Hamilton crash

Both Verstappen and Hamilton escaped sanction for the contact that resulted from the Red Bull driver steaming up the inside, locked up, at Turn 1

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Having cleared Leclerc with a DRS to Turn 1’s inside on lap 57, Verstappen cut into the next 2s ahead and then put Hamilton under considerable pressure. On lap 62, he had Hamilton running him out of road on Turn 2’s outside line after boldly trying it at the downhill left-hander.

Then the next time by, it happened. Again.

As the pair lapped Alex Albon’s Williams on the main straight, Hamilton shot back to the racing line, while Verstappen stayed towards the inside, then lunged from very far back.

When Hamilton was “simply following his normal racing line (which was confirmed by examination of video and telemetry evidence of previous laps)”– per the stewards’ investigation that later didn’t have any penalties to dish out, although did state “it is our determination that the driver of car 44 could have done more to avoid the collision” – Verstappen locked up both front wheels massively.

He slid ever onwards until he clipped the W15’s right-front, bounced up and down, then fell off in the run-off.

Hamilton went on to finish third, calling the clash “hair-raising” but a “racing incident”. Verstappen, who hypocritically insisted Hamilton had been moving under braking two races on from that Austria crash with Norris, slipped behind Leclerc and stayed there.

10. Piastri praised amid the spectre of ‘Multi-21’

Piastri remained calm despite being made to wait by Norris to reclaim the lead

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

Piastri’s manager, Mark Webber, wasn’t in Hungary to see his countryman become the world championship’s 115th GP winner. He was supporting Jaguar driver Mitch Evans’s doomed bid to win the 2024 Formula E title – another team strategy own goal affair, as it turned out.

But the Webber link raised memories of Red Bull’s infamous ‘Multi-21’ controversy at the 2013 Malaysian GP, when team orders weren’t followed.

Piastri, however, was only “concerned if there was a safety car”, as “then it would have taken control out of our hands”. “But we'd spoken about it at the timing of the stop that we would sort it back out,” he revealed. “I had full trust in everyone in the team, including Lando, that we would make that happen.”

Piastri hadn’t been able to close up to Norris in the last stint as he “didn't quite have the pace that I wanted”. His lap times, after the Turn 12 gravel-strike, missed the easier second introductory tour Norris went for at the critical early bedding in phase in the final stint, which won’t have helped Piastri’s tyre life much later on when the gap was increasing.

But Stella, classy as ever amid more intense media scrutiny of his team’s strategy calls – even inviting the huddled print press into the McLaren tyre store to give his briefing away from the paddock disassembly chaos – wanted F1 to remember something.

“I would invite you to look at what happened last year, where Oscar really struggled to control race pace,” said the Italian. “Because this I think gives a sense of how much he has improved in these 12 months in terms of managing tyres in a race stint and in high degradation situation. There's been a lot and good work with him.”

A 1-2 result for McLaren was the team's first since Monza 2021, another occasion when Hamilton and Verstappen made contact

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images