Formula 1

Winners and losers from F1's 2024 Hungarian Grand Prix

by Valentin Khorounzhiy
7 min read

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Formula 1's Hungarian Grand Prix used to have a reputation for being a dull affair, but it's shaken that off in recent years.

And the 2024 edition was plenty entertaining enough - thanks to some late-race internal angst for McLaren, plus a collision between F1's two heavyweight champions.

Here's our pick of winners and losers from the Hungaroring:

Winner: McLaren

There will be a school of thought that McLaren made a meal of what should've been an easy 1-2, giving F1 media a juicy topic to bite into and a team management dilemma to discuss on a day where it even somehow managed to overshadow a phenomenally tetchy and messy drive by the runaway championship leader.

And, well, that may well be true. McLaren's decisions - explained after the race by Andrea Stella as being driven by the the desire to transfer pressure from the pitcrew (which otherwise would've been under a lot more strain to ensure Norris came out ahead of Lewis Hamilton) to the team management side along with a total confidence that Norris would "do the right thing" - created a situation that, no matter how much the team and Norris will try to deflect now, was palpably uncomfortable and stressful for everyone involved.

If the outcome was different in the end, it would've been ruinous. But it wasn't.

McLaren got its 43 points in the constructors' championship, Piastri got his first grand prix win and Norris clearly fully came around to the team's thinking in terms of the team order either already in the car or certainly after the race.

It should not be this hard again any time soon. Prioritising Norris today may have made pure competitive sense, but not for seven points at this stage of the season, not at the expense of Piastri's faith in the team and the relationship between its two drivers, a relationship that's cosier than them being so closely matched competitively suggests.

Loser: Lando Norris

But this was certainly not the ideal outcome for Norris's championship aspirations - which he definitely harbours despite the 76-point gap - on a day on which Red Bull and Max Verstappen looked so fallible.

Ultimately, this should've been a 1-2 led by Norris, and he was right to feel it was lost at the start. He had the pace to win - Stella suggested after the race his drivers were evenly matched on the balance of things, but there seems little doubt that had Norris been ahead he would've stayed ahead.

Race circumstance did put him again in a position to win, but the cost of pulling it off would've been too high. He should've never relinquished that position to win to begin with.

Winner: Sergio Perez

This is a tentative placement of Sergio Perez in the winners' section - it can only be tentative given he finished two places behind his team-mate after said team-mate's extremely out-of-sorts race - but he needed a "get it right" drive and this was it.

Fellow Q1 faller George Russell in the Mercedes was vanquished on merit. The pace in clean air was Verstappen-like or close enough. The Hungaroring is not particularly conducive to a charge, and what happened on Saturday couldn't be erased or fully overcome, but if Sunday is taken as a whole Perez got everything he could've reasonably been expected to out of it.

In doing so, he also confirmed that the glimpses of much improved form from Friday were legitimate.

Will that be enough to safeguard his Red Bull future? Has Red Bull actually learned anything new about Sergio Perez in Hungary?

Only Christian Horner and co will know the answer to those questions, but having taken hit after hit in this last sequence of races, this was Perez's strongest counter-punch yet.

Losers: Max Verstappen and Red Bull

A bad look, a bad result (that could and maybe should've been worse) and a really, really bad day.

Amid building frustration about the performance of the car and the fear that some in his team do not realise the amount of danger his and Red Bull's long-presumed-certain 2024 titles actually are in, Verstappen repeatedly sounded like a driver asking to be not calmed but supported on the radio - and he was not getting that support.

In terms of the race, he and the RB20 were defeated roundly here, though much of that was conditioned by track position - hence Verstappen's angst at the strategy.

But his increasingly tetchy conversations with race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase will only stoke the narrative Verstappen himself loathes so much (that of dysfunction in the team). And his failed overtaking move on Hamilton, apart from costing tangible points, looked like an outburst of related frustration - even if replays do make it clear it wasn't as desperate or ill-judged as it may have looked in the moment.

Winner: Charles Leclerc

This was a fairly potent showing for Ferrari's mini-upgrade in Charles Leclerc's hands - perhaps logically given he has sounded happier with it than Carlos Sainz, even if it's Sainz who had been maximising it the weekend prior.

"It was better than expected," he said. "I felt like the pace was quite strong.

"I felt like we had a bit of an edge [over Mercedes] because on a track where dirty air is so important, it's so detrimental for the car behind, I felt like I could follow quite nicely."

Fourth place does nothing for Ferrari right now, but some positive momentum will be welcome - given the upgrades that it hopes will get it back into the mix with the likes of McLaren and Red Bull won't come at Spa next week or, Sainz suggested, even at Zandvoort after the summer break.

Loser: Daniel Ricciardo

Daniel Ricciardo sounded very nearly as downbeat and let down as he can get after this race.

"I've had a lot of races and I've had a lot of frustrating ones, but that's up there because we had the pace, and we basically gave Yuki [Tsunoda] the race that we had in front of us, and we both could have done that, and we didn't," he said, referencing the decision to bring him in early, which then got him trapped in traffic and fully conditioned his race.

Given Ricciardo, Tsunoda and Liam Lawson are jockeying to be first in line in case Red Bull replaces Perez - who, again, actually had a pretty good race - it was a painful outcome.

Ricciardo, though, will surely soothe himself with the realisation that Red Bull is unlikely to make any judgments on him based on how this race played out, and that his overall weekend performance looked pretty solid indeed.

Winner: Mercedes

"These conditions are not for us," team boss Toto Wolff told Sky Sports F1. "It’s hot and finishing on the podium, third, you need to see it as a success."

Mercedes would've loved for the weather to stay as it had been in the hours leading up to the race - comfortably sub-30C and barely heating the track surface - but probably resigned itself to this kind of race once the heat (semi-)returned.

In that context, hanging onto the lead cars for as long as Hamilton did and then seeing off a Red Bull and the Ferraris for the final step of the podium is a success.

It's not an unqualified success because of Russell's race, but the foundations for that had obviously been laid on Saturday, when Mercedes would've been firmly in the 'losers' column.

Loser: Sauber

Sauber "made a step", in Valtteri Bottas's words, with the upgrade it had this weekend - which means the fact that it still didn't come anywhere particularly near scoring a point is very painful, especially at a track that doesn't punish its high-speed weakness.

"Seeing the bigger picture, I think pace-wise, still we're not in top 10, that's the fact," he said. "But I still feel like we were in a bit better place than in the previous events."

That may be so. But time is running out for Sauber to make any sort of impression in the constructors' championship - and, unless it gets a kind break in a favourable enough race, at this point you would be forgiven for starting to wonder whether, taking aside the prospect of escaping last place in the standings, it's actually going to score anything at all by the time the chequered flag falls in Abu Dhabi.

Loser: Alpine

It's generally good to finish races. Since Barcelona last month, F1 has had just three reliability-induced grand prix exits - and Pierre Gasly has accounted for two of them.

"It's too many issues, too many problems. It's a massive shame," he said after retiring via a hydraulics issue while hanging on in the points on what seemed to be a favourable strategy from a pitlane start.

"I know the team is much better than that."

Esteban Ocon's gloomy 16th-place finish - accompanied by a reference to "issues on my car that I'm having for quite a few events that we need to get rid of, but we can't find" - capped a rotten weekend for Alpine following its fairly unthinkable Q1 misjudgment.

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