What we learned from Friday practice at the 2026 F1 Hungarian GP

Perhaps almost quietly, the Hungaroring has become one of Formula 1's more maligned circuits to a calendar staple. In joining the schedule in 1986, the Hungarian Grand Prix has become the championship's first venture beyond the Iron Curtain, and an ever-present which now celebrates its 40th year.

It's always been an incredibly technical circuit, albeit one where overtaking has come at a premium. This tends to put more value on race strategy and on qualifying, particularly as races tend to be borderline one-stop/two-stop affairs depending on the given degradation on a Sunday afternoon. The Hungaroring is also a "chassis" circuit, one where outright power is generally subservient to a strong car concept with good ride characteristics to ensure nothing is lost on the kerbs and bumps.

So far, it's been a good fit for Ferrari. Charles Leclerc led the way in the opening practice session, as team-mate Lewis Hamilton was less enamoured with the balance of his SF-26 and reported that the car was a little bit too stiffly sprung for his liking. A few tweaks in the interval later, and it was Hamilton who grasped a 1m18.729s on a second effort with his soft tyres, a tenth and a half up on his team-mate. 

While the Ferrari looked poised around the circuit, batting off a still-dusty track surface and gusts of wind to unfurl its solid early pace, its nearest competitors found locking in on an ideal set-up a much more arduous task. 

Mercedes surprisingly looked ill at ease. Across the preceding 2026 rounds, its W17 has posed as a car for all conditions - neither high-downforce, nor low-downforce, nor street-based courses could stop the Silver Arrows from delivering, but the Hungaroring is a very particular customer. The bumpiness of the track seemed to be of some consequence to the cars' lap times, and Kimi Antonelli was also finding a locking rear axle incredibly arduous to work with. F1's championship leader couldn't produce much of a representative soft-tyre lap, as the car didn't fancy acquiescing to his request to enter Turn 6 correctly. 

"It was quite a strange day out there I think for everybody," George Russell reckoned. "Budapest is an amazing track to drive but they've resurfaced half of the track, super bumpy, a lot of it's breaking up around the last couple of corners, which is making it quite strange to drive on. Our single lap didn't look great, the long run looked more competitive but what we essentially feared with Ferrari seemed to be the case. They looked very, very strong."

Ferrari looked quick off the bat in Hungary's Friday sessions

Photo by: Liam Fabre

McLaren, meanwhile, seemed to find something. Lando Norris looked set to sit closer to the Ferraris in the timing boards, had his second effort on the softs not been interrupted by the red flag produced by Franco Colapinto's wall-bothering Alpine. The Argentine's car ran slightly wide in the final corner and was upset by the dust, pulling the rug from underneath the rear end and hurling the A526 backwards into the barrier, with the force of Enzo Fernandez poleaxing a Spanish footballer. 

The Red Bull pair of Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar were on the periphery of entering the mix, particularly in terms of race pace, but Verstappen was not happy with his own rear axle performance under traction, and the wind seemed to make the RB22 a little bit light on grip in the key areas of the circuit. Thus, the team found it a bit difficult to unlock one-lap pace, with Hadjar suggesting that its FP1 set-up was actually a little bit more predictable.

As it stands, then, Ferrari has had the run of the Hungaroring in the one-lap stakes - but race pace is quite another matter. 

Average FP2 long runs

* No representative stint from Aston Martin in FP2

There are two colossal caveats to the race simulation data here: traffic and stint length. While traffic will undoubtedly play a role in Sunday's proceedings, the random appearances of marginally slower lap times is not something that we can use to determine the unrestricted race pace shown. This, plus Hamilton's very short stint on the medium tyre, doesn't give us a full picture of what Ferrari has in its pocket over a longer run.

Hamilton found himself in traffic during his own six-lap spell on mediums, while Leclerc showed strong pace on the soft - but interspersed with slower tours to account for the other cars in his proximity.

Red Bull showed good race pace, but short stints mask its true performance

Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images

Verstappen's short stint on the medium, however, puts him on top of the reckoning here - but the six-lap spell on the hards scarcely offers much of a window into the drop-off of the tyre.

This was evident in his later soft-tyre stint, where he could nip past Hamilton with ease with a six-lap offset between his red-walled tyre and Hamilton's older yellow-walled rubber. Leclerc's stint on softs would have been on top of this order (an average of a 1m24.186s) but a lot of traffic-affected laps had to be pulled out of this. 

So these two are our outliers at the moment, even if Red Bull felt that it was stronger on long-run pace than it was over a single lap. The similar-length stints between McLaren and Mercedes lend credence to the feeling that the two teams are evenly matched here; McLaren's floor update appears to have clicked and is offering a smidgen of extra performance with low-speed downforce, although Mercedes knows that it has more performance to find. 

In terms of the midfield order, Audi looks to be in a solid position. Using either Nico Hulkenberg's soft tyre run or Gabriel Bortoleto's hard-tyre run (we chose the latter to focus on the harder compounds) puts the silver cars ahead of Racing Bulls' best average stint on the hards, and it appears that Audi's boasts of having a strong chassis is yielding dividends around the Hungaroring. That's not to say that the VCARB is a bad car, but the R26 is often painted as a great chassis held back by a solid-if-unspectacular powertrain.

Esteban Ocon's medium-tyre run showed that Haas can be a part of this pack, and qualifying pace didn't seem to be too bad on first glance. This put him over a tenth clear on average of Pierre Gasly's shorter stint in the Alpine, as the French squad appears to be finding life tough at the moment; after a bright start to the year, these two teams have fallen back in the order.

Both Williams drivers looked very slow on the hard tyre; Alex Albon suggested that the team would struggle in Hungary as the lower-speed corners tend to exacerbate the three-wheeling phenomenon within the car that lifts the inside rear-right.

The Williams looked difficult to handle, and tends to struggle on low-speed circuits

Photo by: Liam Fabre

This limits overall through-corner grip, particularly in combined braking-turning corners where the drivers tend to use more trail-braking. This put the team short of its midfield rivals, but just a bit ahead of Cadillac - which looked reasonable with Sergio Perez's medium-tyre stint, which was pretty much exactly on-par with that of Valtteri Bottas.

Aston Martin, at this stage, is an unknown. The Silverstone squad's massive update package appeared to give the team a boost in terms of one-lap pace, as Fernando Alonso put his car between the Cadillac pair over his soft-tyre flyer. That said, his faster effort - a 1m21.348s - was chalked off for track limits, and this would have plonked him between the Williams pair.

What we don't really know is how this translates to race pace, as he did five laps on the soft and two of those laps weren't really in the 'acceptable race pace' ballpark. And, to be fair, this is not unusual for Aston Martin, which rarely does anything beyond a short blast in FP2. Without Lance Stroll, whose car was not ready to go out for FP2 as the team tried to diagnose the rear suspension issue that forced him to pull up at the side of the road in FP1, it is largely unclear what the time gain is with its new package. 

Aston Martin was still validating its extensive aero update in FP2

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / LAT Images via Getty Images