FERRARI DISASTER ALLOWS MAX TO SPIN AND WIN
When your two biggest rival teams laugh in derision at your strategy calls, clearly something critical has gone awry. That’s what occurred in the Hungaroring driver cooldown room last Sunday, as the podium finishers checked out the hastily edited highlights of the 70 laps not long concluded. Runner-up Lewis Hamilton seemed a touch bemused when he clocked a moment in the video and had to check with Max Verstappen. “They were on the hards?”, he asked. The surprise victor tittered “Yeah” in reply, and third-placed George Russell couldn’t entirely suppress a smile.
This top three came after a dry grand prix in which there had been no full safety car to artificially bunch the pack; the Ferraris had started second and third while the Red Bulls lined up down in 10th and 11th; and Verstappen had even spun. Yet Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc could only muster fourth and sixth at the finish line, which they crossed 15 seconds after the Dutch ace – now the runaway championship leader heading into the summer break.
While results haven’t always gone Red Bull’s way, since 2010 the high-downforce requirements of the Budapest circuit’s 14 corners have suited the team most of all. But coinciding with, if not directly related to, the switch to ground-effects for 2022, that (on paper) advantage stopped for this visit. The tighter corners dictate multiple bursts of low-speed acceleration, which flatters the eager Ferrari engine over the long-legged rebadged Honda power units in the back of the RB18s.
Accordingly, the brace of F1-75s set the pace in both qualifying and race simulations across Friday
