French GP Hungarian GP
The brace of races before F1’s summer shutdown both featured the exact same podium: Red Bull’s Max Verstappen on the top of it, Lewis Hamilton second and his Mercedes team-mate George Russell third. Missing from both was any Ferrari driver, and therein lies a story.
Charles Leclerc spun out of the lead at Paul Ricard, denying that race any tension as he was in a close strategic battle with Verstappen.
A week later, around the Hungaroring – a track at which Ferrari was heavily expected to dominate – Carlos Sainz and Leclerc could finish no better than fourth and sixth respectively.
Despite a glittering sequence of pole positions this year, Ferrari headed into the summer break with Leclerc trailing Verstappen by 80 points, their title hopes seemingly forlorn. Reliability issues, bad strategy calls, driver errors and set up misjudgements had all contributed as Verstappen and Red Bull just kept pounding out brilliantly judged victories. With track temperatures of 50°C-plus, the challenge at Ricard was expected to be front tyre degradation. Red Bull and Ferrari had each assessed this challenge differently.
Red Bull had endowed its RB18 with a skinny wing to fly it down the Mistral straight way faster than the Ferrari, which used the medium-downforce wing first introduced in Canada. That gave it way more speed through the circuit’s faster corners, especially the long
parabola of Le Beausset, taken in fourth gear, where the Ferrari was 9mph faster than the Red Bull or Mercedes. Leclerc and Sainz were able to go super-deep into there, running to the outer edges before making a sharp ‘V’ turn to rocket out the exit.
Red Bull felt that using up the greater cornering potential of a bigger-winged car would potentially exhaust the rubber much
