Max on P11 after first day in Budapest: 'We were quite competitive'

Published on 21 July 2023 by Misha van der Kroon

After a P19 and no time set in the first practice session, due to, among other things the rain, FP2 was not much better for Max Verstappen. He ended the session with the eleventh time. Charles Leclerc in his Ferrari set the fastest time, followed by Lando Norris in the McLaren and Pierre Gasly in the Alpine. The top five is completed by the AlphaTauri of Yuki Tsunoda and the Alpine of Esteban Ocon. Max’ teammate at Oracle Red Bull Racing set the eighteenth time.

“It’s very hard to comment on the upgrades,” Max says after the second practice session in Budapest. “We’ll look at the data to see if everything is correlating well.”

He continues: “We haven’t used a lot of tyre sets today, because with this new format you’re just super limited with the tyre sets you can use. And we didn’t want to use them today, to have better preparation tomorrow.”

The World Champion is pleased with his car: “The car felt not too bad, I had a bit of understeer, and on the long runs we were quite competitive. It’s difficult to say something about the one-lap pace, but overall the car is strong.”

Rain has stopped and it’s dry at the start of the second session on Friday. There is still a 40% chance of rain, but that’s significantly less compared to the first practice session earlier on the day. Because of the rain that fell earlier, it’s no surprise that it’s immediately busy on track when FP2 starts. We mainly see cars on the medium compound. Only the both Williams drivers are driving around on the softs, and Kevin Magnussen has put a set of hard tyres on his Haas. 

It takes a while before we see Max on track, because five minutes into the session the reigning World Champion is still talking next to his car with his engineer. Alexander Albon is the first driver to set a time.

After almost ten minutes Max climbs into his car, while Logan Sargeant surprisingly sets the fastest time in his Williams. Both Red Bulls, Ferraris and Mercedes have not shown anything yet.

In the end Max is the last one to go out on track. Perez went ahead of him on a set of soft tyres. The Mexican, who crashed in the opening phase of FP1, sets the sixth fastest time on his first flying lap of FP2. Moments later, Max also sets a fast time that brings him to P2, just seven hundredths behind Sargeant’s Williams. The team of Williams shows that they got it right at the Hungaroring, as Albon takes over P1 from his teammate.

However, Albon’s time does not hold for long, because successively Lance Stroll, Nico Hülkenberg and Yuki Tsunoda pass the British Thai and take over P1. Max Verstappen and Fernando Alonso also improve their times, but neither of them ends up on P1, they take fourth and third place respectively. Max returns to the pits not long after for some adjustments.

After being in the lower regions for the majority of the session, the Ferrari’s seem to have found some speed with a bit more than 20 minutes on the clock. Leclerc puts his car on P1, while Carlos Sainz lags behind and only ends up on P10.

With 19 minutes on the clock, Max has dropped back to P11. He leaves his garage again on the same set of softs he started the session on. A mediocre mid sector prevents him from improving his time on his first attempt, staying in P11. Over the on-board radio Max informs his team that there is a delay in the battery, so the required energy is released later than expected. 

With 10 minutes to go, Logan Sargeant is told that rain is falling, and the dark clouds around the circuit do not bode well. We don’t know how much fuel all drivers have in their cars, but it seems that the team of Red Bull Racing has a lot of work to do. With an eleventh (Max) and eighteenth (Perez) place, they won’t be very satisfied.

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Results second free practice Hungary: