The McLaren team was mixed on whether their slow-speed weakness has been fixed after a strong weekend in Hungary.
Carlos Sainz enjoyed a solid drive to sixth place in Budapest by holding off Pierre Gasly in the Red Bull, while teammate Lando Norris was also on course for a strong result before losing out after a slow pit-stop.
While it’s a result that largely echoes their position as the fourth-best team in recent months, to achieve on a circuit that was expected not to suit their car is particularly pleasing.
“On a track with a lot of low-speed corners, where we had definitely a weakness on the car, to see that we could now cure some of the issues with the updates we are bringing, and understanding the car better, and better, and how to use it, it is obviously great to have clearly been the fourth-quickest car.” team boss Andreas Seidl commented.
“It is now a big boost for us going into the break, and also for the second half of the season because we have some tracks coming up with low-speed sections and so on.
“That is very, very encouraging.”
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Sainz himself, however, was a little more sceptical suggesting today’s cars have altered the characteristics of the Hungarian circuit.
“Maybe the Hungaroring has become a medium speed track with Formula 1 cars because it feels fast out there and that suits us a bit better than what we anticipated,” he said.
“And this kind of black Tarmac, as we saw in Austria and Paul Ricard, new surfaces help our performance.
“This weekend we were decently surprised, but still we were lapped so that’s another thing that we need to add to that, so we still have a lot of work to do.”
Indeed, while McLaren was ‘best of the rest’, Alfa Romeo’s Kimi Raikkonen does think there was a missed opportunity to beat them.
“I don’t know really because I didn’t expect much,” he said on his satisfaction with P7.
“Obviously I had no idea where we were going to end up after Friday, but actually the car was behaving very well.
“I thought we had more speed than McLaren at the beginning, but then after the pit-stop, we knew that it was impossible to overtake and I had to save the tyres for the end.
“We lost one position in the pit stop, we gained one, so maybe the only thing we could have done better was stopping a lap earlier but that’s how it goes.”
