MPH: Decoded - why Russell and Piastri can't keep up with their F1 team-mates

Last weekend in Budapest, Lando Norris, after an uncertain start to the weekend, was picked up by the wind from Saturday onwards and rose kite-like to a superlative height of performance which allowed him to dominate the whole event.

By contrast, Ferrari blew into the circuit, set its cars down on the track and initially looked unbeatable. But came away with fourth and fifth place finishes.

It was another lesson about the sensitivity of this generation of F1 car. But this time it wasn’t about electrical energy management as we’d seen at Spa and other places, but the sensitivity to the wind and to circuit grip. Way more sensitive than ever before and that understanding is instructive in putting some more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of 2026 performance together.

Let’s take two of the main competitive themes of the weekend: 1) the aforementioned inversion of McLaren and Ferrari from one day to the next and 2) the struggle for pace of two world-class drivers, George Russell and Oscar Piastri, despite them being in very quick cars. We can begin to fit a framework of understanding around just how these cars work and need to be driven based on what we saw last weekend.

The two essential factors behind the performances we saw were track surface grip and wind direction. Last year the venue invested heavily in a new pitlane, buildings and infrastructure, but in the meantime the circuit itself was deteriorating and for this year the budget stretched only to some new patches of asphalt around Turn 1 and Turn 12, where the worst degradation had been. However, the new patches were much less grippy than the existing surfaces elsewhere around the track, which made for a tricky dilemma.

As everyone gradually discovered through the practices, it meant that there wasn’t a perfect set-up available. Get it balanced for one part of the lap and it was unstable through those two critical turns. Get it balanced for those corners and you’d bleed laptime away with understeer through the other long-duration turns. The best you could do was find a sort of happy average and then just drive it. So we saw way more rapid steering corrections than is the norm in modern F1 as drivers fought the balance.

When added to the long-established Hungaroring phenomenon of the rear tyres being too hot by the end of the lap – through the long hairpin of Turn 13 and the long final Turn 14 – it made the whole challenge of putting a lap together much more intricate than usual. And not everyone decoded it.

The final turn in particular saw a huge variation in approaches through the practices and into qualifying. Norris and Lewis Hamilton were each masterful here. They’d either worked out it needed a different approach to normal or had just intuitively felt it. But their way of turning in early and shallow – not using anything like the full width of the track on approach – and keeping momentum through the corner, being patient, letting the momentum carry them before getting on the power, was far more effective than the traditional wide approach/hard turn-in and geometric line.

These ’26 cars do not have enough grip to be driven like that on a hot low-grip surface and would object with multiple snaps of oversteer through the corner. Kimi Antonelli migrated towards the early, shallow entry but it was Norris and Hamilton who were straight onto it. In fairness, Piastri steadily moved in that direction too, but by the time he’d evolved his approach, he will have made all sorts of set-up and settings tweaks and so will have been chasing more of a moving target.

The natural way of both Piastri and Russell is to turn in late and hard, asking a lot of the front end of the car. When the track grip is high and the car has a great front end, it can work very well indeed. But the ’26 generation of car, with its reduced aero load, often cannot reward such an approach, particularly if the surface grip is low. Right there is a possible source of the struggles both drivers have been having this year, tallying with how they have both been highly competitive at some tracks, struggling badly at others.

It’s a voyage of discovery for everyone and data banks filled up and muscle memory formed over years may now be partly obsolete. It’s unfortunate that these were the two drivers who suffered at Spa from what Mercedes has described as a software error in how their energy was distributed over the lap. Yet with that corrected for Hungary, here they were still struggling. But it was for different reasons and merely coincidental it was the same two drivers.

Track grip does seem to be a fundamental mechanism in driving the varying patterns of driver performance we are seeing and at Budapest – just like at Miami – the hot low-grip track did seem to exaggerate the usual lap time differences between team-mates. Wind strength and direction were having more of an impact on the cars themselves. As Norris noted after the race, “I was pretty disappointed with the pace and how the car was handling in FP1. It got a little bit better in FP2, but still, the Ferraris were just on another level. But the wind changed from Friday to Saturday, and Saturday’s wind really suited our car a lot more. I had a lot more confidence in driving the car, so I could push more.”