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Nobody in the Formula 1 field had a fault-free weekend at the Hungarian Grand Prix - but that's perhaps for the best considering the two major battles that developed in the closing stages of the race.
So which drivers made the best of things at the Hungaroring - or rather, how punishing were some of their errors?
Here's Edd Straw's verdict in his Formula 1 driver rankings:
How do the rankings work? The 20 drivers will be ranked in order of performance from best to worst on each grand prix weekend. This will be based on the full range of criteria, ranging from pace and racecraft to consistency and whether they made key mistakes. How close each driver got to delivering on the maximum performance potential of the car will be an essential consideration.
It’s important to note both that this reflects performance across the entire weekend, cognisant of the fact that qualifying is effectively ‘lap 0’ of the race and key to laying the foundations to the race, and that it is not a ranking of the all-round qualities of each driver. It’s simply about how they performed on a given weekend. Therefore, the ranking will fluctuate significantly from weekend to weekend.
And with each of the 10 cars fundamentally having different performance potential and ‘luck’ (ie factors outside of a driver’s control) contributing to the way the weekend plays out, this ranking will also differ significantly from the overall results.
Started: 2nd Finished: 1st
Piastri’s race has to be viewed not as one where he was given victory by team orders, but one in which he sacrificed five seconds of race time by team-mate Lando Norris being given a two-lap undercut at the final stint.
There were a couple of moments in the race, one at Turn 11 then another when he grazed the gravel after his second stop, and his pace in the final stint wasn’t as strong as Norris’s (on top of his team-mate being ahead in qualifying).
But he also did an excellent job of taking the lead at the start and controlling the first half of the race until things started to get complicated.
Verdict: Not perfect, but then again nobody was this weekend.
Started: 5th Finished: 3rd
Aside from the fact he could perhaps have opened out the steering to avoid the risk of damage posed by contact set in motion by Max Verstappen steaming up the inside late on, Hamilton had a strong weekend.
He struggled with the car being a little too snappy in the warmer temperatures but qualified decently and then produced a strong race. He used the undercut to get ahead of Verstappen then held him back in the second and third stints.
Verdict: A strong weekend’s work.
Started: 1st Finished: 2nd
Norris’s failure to win from pole position wasn’t really because of team orders, it was down to losing the lead at the start.
Regardless of whether he might have chased down and passed Piastri in the final stint had he not been given a two-lap undercut on his team-mate, that wasn’t the race that played out. Instead, he was promoted to the lead with a strategy that Piastri wasn’t allowed to cover - meaning ceding first place was a reasonable, if painful, request.
Verdict: Only the start let him down.
Started: 6th Finished: 4th
Leclerc’s needless FP2 crash got his weekend off to a bad start, but it got better with each day.
He had a decent Saturday, admitting “I didn’t do the lap of my life” having opted to use his one set of softs for the first Q3 run before being denied a second run by the red flag. His race was excellent, making a good start to jump to fifth before showing good pace in both the first and, in particular, second stint. Verstappen’s incident with Hamilton allowed Leclerc to pick up fourth place.
Verdict: Poor Friday, decent Saturday, superb Sunday.
Started: 4th Finished: 6th
Sainz continues to make close to the best of a bad job as Ferrari battles through this difficult phase and was far from convinced it had made gains with the floor tweak introduced in Hungary.
He produced the best possible result in qualifying, albeit with his advantage over Leclerc stretched by Q3 strategy.
Wheelspin in what he called his first bad start to the season dropped him to seventh behind Leclerc and Fernando Alonso. He soon repassed Alonso to take a vice-like grip on sixth place.
Verdict: A bad start lost him the intra-team battle.
Started: 9th Finished: 12th
Ricciardo was the only driver to improve his time after the red flag caused by team-mate Yuki Tsunoda in Q3, moving him ahead of his team-mate on the grid.
A tricky first lap meant he was shuffled back to 11th and, having started on mediums, he was surprised to be called in early - which left him stuck in the early-stopper train and ultimately not quite in the hunt for points. With a different approach, he likely would have finished ahead of his team-mate.
Verdict: With a different strategy, points were on offer.
Started: 11th Finished: 13th
Despite finding the car “tricky” and “not as good as I was expecting” at the Hungaroring, Hulkenberg put in a strong lap on used softs late in Q2 to miss out on Q3 by just one hundredth of a second.
A poor start dropped him to 14th, meaning he stopped early for hards. And while that led to short-term gains, it didn’t pay off in the long term with two more long stints required.
Verdict: Poor start ruined his points shot.
Started: 7th Finished: 11th
This was a weekend that promised more both in qualifying and the race.
The lap Alonso was on when Q3 was red flagged was reckoned by the team to be good enough for fifth, while the early stop made in reaction to the early stoppers meant Alonso “knew that the race was over” - meaning his subsequent strategy partly played out to assist Lance Stroll.
He held 10th but was unable to threaten Tsunoda in the closing stages, ceding the final point to let Stroll, on fresher tyres, have an unsuccessful crack at the RB.
Verdict: Unfortunate in both qualifying and race.
Started: 8th Finished: 10th
While Stroll’s single-lap pace wasn’t as good as Alonso’s, he executed the race well.
He went longest of the four drivers to start on softs by some margin, which meant he could capitalise on fresher rubber in the final stint when the early stoppers struggled. He passed three of them - Hulkenberg, Ricciardo and then, with a wave-by, Alonso to pick up the final point but couldn’t do anything about Tsunoda.
Verdict: A decent weekend’s work.
Started: 3rd Finished: 5th
Verstappen swung between realism, frustration and anger at Red Bull’s struggle for pace. Nonetheless, he made the most of a tricky car to qualify right behind the faster McLarens before losing a couple of places in the grand prix.
Being undercut by Hamilton (and Leclerc) was down to strategy, but the fact he couldn’t get back past and then made a rash move that could so easily have put him out of the race and led to him dropping behind Leclerc wasn’t Verstappen at his most well-judged.
Verdict: Could have finished two places higher.
Started: 10th Finished: 9th
Tsunoda’s weekend was going well until the moment he ran wide out of Turn 5 in Q3 and was pitched heavily enough into the barrier to trigger a visit to the medical centre and a chassis change.
But he largely made up for that in the race with an unexpected, and well-executed, one-stop strategy that yielded ninth place, having held off the Aston Martins, both on fresher rubber, in the final stint.
Verdict: Crash hurts his ranking, but unlikely one-stopper compensates.
Started: 12th Finished: 16th
Bottas qualified well, getting the Sauber to just a tenth away from Q3. But the speed wasn’t there in the race to threaten for points, with Bottas avoiding the early stop but then facing too much traffic to make the most of any tyre-life advantage gained.
He came close to nicking 15th off Kevin Magnussen on the last lap after the Haas driver lost momentum being lapped, but missed out by a tenth.
Verdict: Did what he could with a limited car.
Started: 13th Finished: 14th
Albon felt there was more pace in the car in qualifying, but the run plan in Q2 meant he lost performance in dirty air. He made up for that with a great start on softs, taking advantage of the outside line at Turn 1 - but never trying to grab too much - to take ninth on the first lap.
He was always destined for an early stop and ended up in the queue behind Hulkenberg. He also felt Alonso was backing him up at times to help Stroll, which ensured there was no chance to fight back into the top 10.
Verdict: Pace was better than he could show.
Started: 17th Finished: 8th
Russell summed his weekend up as “you make a mistake, you get punished”. That referred to the Q1 mismanagement that meant he didn’t set a time in the best of the conditions, which was down to miscommunication and poor strategy that both driver and team had a stake in.
He chased Sergio Perez for most of the race - Russell was actually ahead after the start - but ran longer in the first two stints and was never able to threaten a pass on track on his way to salvaging four points.
Verdict: Q1 disaster defined his weekend.
Started: 16th Finished: 7th
This was a weekend that promised so much more. Perez described Friday as his best of the season and wasn’t able to prove whether or not that was wishful thinking because of his qualifying crash.
The shunt itself should have been avoided as he knew the rain was falling so could have been more wary with the Turn 8 entry kerb, but it didn’t completely ruin his weekend.
Perez showed genuinely good pace in the race and recovered to seventh, keeping on top of the chasing Russell in what was probably his best race drive of the past couple of months.
Verdict: Crash set back encouraging weekend.
Started: 15th Finished: 15th
After his departure from Haas was announced ahead of the weekend, Magnussen showed decent pace in fits and starts, only for a “messy” session to cost him what he thought was a Q3 shot.
He did a great job on the first lap to make the most of the soft Pirellis, including a superb pass on Ricciardo around the outside at Turn 5, to hold 10th briefly.
But that inevitably meant an early stop and, given the car's pace, no chance of points - although he did just keep Bottas at bay on the last lap after falling into his clutches when he was lapped by Russell.
Verdict: Again, second-best of the Haas duo.
Started: 14th Finished: 17th
Sargeant wasn’t afraid to let his irritation, either with what he felt was unjustified criticism of his performance or traffic on his final qualifying lap, shine through at the Hungaroring.
If nothing else, it shows he’s not going to fade out of F1 with a whimper and he continued his quiet improvement by qualifying 0.114s slower than Albon. But that was only after getting away with dinging the front-left in the Turn 1 barrier in Q1 after locking up in slippery conditions.
His race was among those stymied by wheelspin at the start and an early pitstop that meant a long afternoon down the order.
Verdict: Good pace, but fortunate to get away with Q1 wall-tag.
Started: 19th Finished: 18th
Like his team-mate, Ocon’s Q1 was ruined by not running in the best of the conditions after the red flag.
That was made worse by opting to stop him early in an attempt to undercut and gain positions, which paid off short-term but not long term. That showed by the fact he made an extra stop late on after a long hard stint, but that only turned a bad finish into a slightly worse one.
Verdict: On a hiding to nothing.
Started: 20th (pits) Finished: DNF
While this weekend was slightly more fruitful for Gasly than his disastrous Silverstone outing, it wasn’t by much.
Qualifying started well, but then turned to disaster when the Alpine’s stayed in the pits when Q1 restarted having misjudged conditions, which meant there was no chance to improve.
After taking fresh power unit components and starting from the pits, running long on hards was the only option, but it was a strategy that went nowhere before he retired with what was described as a suspected hydraulic leak.
Verdict: Again, little chance to impress.
Started: 18th Finished: 19th
Zhou wasn’t able to follow his team-mate out of Q1, with an early stop condemning him to what he called a “lonely and uneventful race” with Ocon his only company at the back come the chequered flag after the Alpine driver made an extra stop.
The car's race pace wasn’t great and Zhou struggled owing to his longer hard stints than Bottas.
Verdict: A weekend of toil at the back.
