The reigning world champion won the Hungarian Grand Prix, and a Formula 1 superteam full of great technical minds finished ahead of a number of other cars.
Normally neither of those things would be very surprising, but this is the 2026 F1 season, so actually the Hungaroring produced quite a few form flips.
Here's our take on the stars and flops.
Winner: Max Verstappen (2nd)
Credit to Red Bull for its part in Verstappen's strategy, particularly for clocking that the soft was a viable tyre for Verstappen to take for 29 laps in the final stint. (As a couple of cars, including Fernando Alonso's Aston Martin, had proved earlier in the race.)
But you have to give so much credit to Verstappen, too. The Red Bull was, on balance, the fourth-fastest car at the Hungaroring and while the top teams were more evenly-matched in race trim than at arguably any other track so far in this rules cycle, the RB22 really didn't have any right being on the podium.
Had it not been for his late-race retirement at Silverstone, Verstappen would in all likelihood now have four podium finishes in a row. Not bad in a car that again, on balance, has probably been fourth-best across that span of weekends.
Yet more evidence (as if it were necessary) of the level he's operating at, and why F1 needs him to stay put. - Jack Cozens
Loser: Oscar Piastri (DNF)
Taking the lead at the start of the race was "definitely the highlight" for Piastri, but "it went pretty downhill from there".
It was clear Lando Norris had the pace advantage on him despite Piastri's opportunistic first lap. Piastri's pace on the hard tyre was "nowhere", and then "obviously getting taken out by a backmarker is never really one of the things you think can go wrong, but I was proven wrong".
In a season where race-winning competitiveness has been absent for McLaren, this was a massive missed opportunity for team and driver to seal a 1-2 - even if that was ultimately down to a technical issue.
You can tell how much this hurt Piastri considering how aggressively he's gone after Carlos Sainz in the post-race interviews, telling Viaplay the way the lapped Williams veered into him was "one of the dumbest things I've ever seen on a racetrack". - Jack Benyon
Winner: Lando Norris (1st)
"I think today was some of the best pace I've had," was Norris's immediate assessment after his victory, and he was pretty spot on given he was undoubtedly the fastest driver on track.
Of course, it didn't all go the McLaren driver's way. He was overtaken after a small moment at Turn 2 on the first lap by Piastri, but was pretty unfazed barring a couple of typical "I'm faster" radio messages. A few more off-track moments followed, but Norris admitted he never once lost the belief that he could win the race.
Insistent on proving that he had that pace by going a bit off-course with his strategy, he eventually got to do just that with the overcut. After getting out ahead of Piastri and feeling "so much more confident" in his McLaren following the introduction of its first major upgrades, Norris was simply able to pull away to a first victory of 2026.
"There was luck on my side," Norris admitted after his team-mate's late misfortune. However, it wasn't just luck, but the sheer pace and confidence he had that got him over the line. - Eden Hannigan
Loser: Ferrari (4th & 5th)
"There were two races where we were expecting to struggle and we finished first and second. And in the race where we expected to do well, we finished fourth and fifth."
Charles Leclerc neatly summed up the baffling missed opportunity of the low-on-power, great-in-corners Ferrari going from its commanding Friday at the twisty, short-on-straights Hungaroring to not even getting a car on the podium. Having of course just won and been a close second at the power-hungry Silverstone and Spa.
This wasn't Ferrari's smoothest weekend for execution or tactics, of course. But it wasn't just that. On paper this was a golden chance to take a gouge out of Mercedes' championship advantages - and instead it lost ground in the drivers' title race and only nibbled one point back in the constructors'. - MB
Loser: George Russell (7th)
There's no point really trying to sugarcoat this, is there?
"I'm sort of past the point of disappointment now," said Russell after his seventh-place finish which, if we are to clutch at straws, did at least mark a decent recovery considering he dropped to 22nd off the line.
He said of another "technical issue" at the start, reported as anti-stall at the time, that four seconds before the lights went out "the engine just started revving all over the place" and "I was reacting with my throttle and it was doing nothing".
But let's not pretend that without that this was going to arrest the trend of Kimi Antonelli simply looking the faster of the two Mercedes drivers.
As Russell said of his race, "the result was s***. But the things that I could have controlled, they were just OK" - and in truth he's probably slightly fortunate that Mercedes' relative pace this weekend meant Antonelli couldn't inflict a bigger defeat on him.
All in all, a pretty flat way to end the first half of the season. "I usually don't feel like I need a break; this year I definitely feel like I need one." - JC
Winner: Kimi Antonelli (3rd)
With Russell starting pretty much in reverse and Ferrari finding all kinds of ways to score fewer points than it should, this always had the potential to be a great title bid day for Antonelli whatever he did.
There was a point when it looked like he might be able to pull the one-stop strategy off and victory from seventh on the grid looked achievable. And other phases where it looked like an anonymous, but not very costly, edge-of-top-six result would be his limit.
In the end a podium and a championship lead five points bigger than he arrived with counts as a very decent day's work. - MB
Winner: Aston Martin (13th & 14th)
Another excellent day at the office - by its 2026 standards - for Aston Martin, which appeared to run smoothly and beat plenty of other cars. The only surprise was that Lance Stroll finished ahead of Alonso despite starting four places behind him!
A very early stop to get rid of the softs for Stroll while Alonso did over 30 laps on his first set of them was the key in that change-around. However, which one of them was ahead doesn't really matter too much when they're still outside the points.
The takeaways are clear: the team now needs an engine upgrade from Honda looking at its performance on the straights, and, while it not be the case at every track, this weekend at least that first upgrade put it straight ahead of Williams, Haas and Cadillac in very impressive fashion. - JB
Loser: Cadillac (DNF & DNF)
On a weekend Aston Martin brought its big upgrade, it looked more like the other teams at the back of the pack floundered more than usual, and none epitomised that more than the on-fire and broken Cadillacs.
Valtteri Bottas was the first to retire with brake issues. Just as the team suggested things were improving and he could reduce the lift and coast he and Sergio Perez had been doing to guard against Cadillac's habitual problem, "suddenly, everything was on fire".
It's doubly painful as the team's new brake ducts were brought to Hungary to solve this exact issue.
Perez's race-ending issue is yet to be fully diagnosed but is not the same as the suspension issue that you may remember took him out in Canada, and is "internal".
Cadillac can be forgiven for being slower than its rivals given the team's newness, but its apparent inability to solve some of its fundamental reliability weaknesses has to remain a worry. - JB
Winner: Nico Hulkenberg (9th)
There was a brief bit of debate over Nico Hulkenberg's place in this list. After all, without Piastri's retirement this would only have been 10th - if that, as he was 12th and pursuing Liam Lawson's Racing Bulls at the time of the VSC deployment.
But Hulkenberg does get the nod for being generally the stronger of the two Audi drivers across the weekend, and of course for landing his first points of the 2026 season - which he felt was "very overdue".
The only slight regret might be that best-of-the rest status was achievable - but considering that place to Lawson was lost at the start, and the Audi's generally been difficult to get off the line this season, it hardly feels as though that can be held against Hulkenberg. - JC
Loser: Williams (17th & 18th)
Sainz felt this might be the worst weekend of the season and so that proved, with Williams mired at the back and actually even closer to Cadillac behind than Haas ahead of it in the pecking order.
What it really didn't need to make that performance look even more galling, then, was Aston Martin's "eye-opening" performance step that took it firmly into the midfield and well ahead of Williams - where Alex Albon thought it will stay for the remainder of the season.
Sainz, who's come in for plenty of praise this season for his performances, didn't help himself either by hitting Piastri. He insisted the McLaren that was trying to lap him was in his blindspot, but this was a clumsy clash that completed one of his messier F1 weekends - having in FP1 alone twice been noted for erratic driving and also been shown a black and white flag for impeding.
Still, it's the competitive picture that caused both drivers most pain. "If we were not so slow, there wouldn't be so many blue flags," Sainz reckoned, while Albon offered a warning over the rest of the season and Williams's upgrade plan: "A lot of what we're really, unfortunately, biting into is making sure next year's car doesn't have these traits." - JC
Winner: Liam Lawson (8th)
It might look like the hard work for Lawson was done at the start when he made up for his self-admitted poor qualifying performance to leap into the top 10.
But on top of that, he had to deal with an unexpected two-stop when he'd been heavily saving tyres anticipating a one-stop in the early stages, losing loads of time behind Verstappen's huge overtake on Lewis Hamilton, and a late wheel-to-wheel fight with Racing Bulls team-mate Arvid Lindblad as their strategies came back together.
The reward was another triumph over his team-mate, another instance of Racing Bulls leading the midfield, enough points to steal fifth in the constructors' from Alpine, and all at a track where Audi was expected to lead the fight.
A very, very good day at the office for driver and team - with Lindblad still scoring too in 10th. - JB
Loser: Haas (16th & 19th)
It still feels like there's a mountain to climb for Haas to actually look competitive in F1 2026 again, and the Hungarian GP offered more evidence.
Another of the teams leapfrogged by a heavily upgraded Aston Martin package, Haas just had an inconsistent weekend across its garage that reflected in the final results after a tussle with Williams.
Esteban Ocon finished 16th and saved Haas from being the worst-performing team that finished the race - actually sounding semi-positive about his own performance: "Getting the car healthy, getting the maximum out of the car this weekend felt good."
But "honestly, it was a bit of a nightmare" was Ollie Bearman's assessment, as he picked up a penalty amid the blue-flag system failure and finished 19th and last.
"Generally it's just been a horrible weekend. From the first lap that I've done until now, I've not been able to find any confidence. It's like all that progress we've made over the last two events maybe has been erased, and we're back to square one."
That doesn't make for positive reading for Haas going into the summer break. - EH
from The Race https://ift.tt/7MZynSa
No comments: