Ferrari arrived at the Hungaroring as the team everyone expected to beat. Instead, it left with fourth and fifth places, a bigger gap to Kimi Antonelli in the drivers’ championship, and barely a dent made in Mercedes‘ constructors’ lead.
For a team that had topped both Friday sessions and had only just missed out on pole, that gap between expectation and result is one of the stories of the weekend.
The signs on Friday were unambiguous. Ferrari was fastest in both practice sessions, and that pace carried into qualifying: Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc lined up second and third, split from a Ferrari front row only by Lando Norris‘s late pole lap.
Even McLaren team principal Andrea Stella conceded that Norris’s lap had been something of an overachievement, and that his own car’s chassis was not yet the equal of Ferrari‘s around the Hungaroring‘s tight, low-speed corners.
“When we look carefully at the data, we see that if we take the best corners of Leclerc and the best corners of Hamilton, I think still they had the highest potential,” he said.
That made Sunday’s result — Leclerc fourth, Hamilton fifth, no Ferrari on the podium for the first time since Austria and for the third time this year – hard to square with the form book.
Team principal Fred Vasseur didn’t try to dress it up.
Hamilton had looked like favourite after Friday
Grand Prix Photo
“It’s not a good Sunday, because when you are 1-2 on Friday you expect much more than P4-P5,” he said afterwards, adding that “the execution was very poor. It’s more the execution” than a lack of underlying pace.
Where it unravelled
Vasseur’s list of what went wrong reads less like one bad decision than an accumulation of small ones.
Ferrari lost time at the start, Hamilton picked up a pitlane speeding penalty after switching off his limiter a fraction early, Max Verstappen passed both cars on track, and Vasseur estimated the team lost around two to three tenths in each of its own pitstops.
None of those alone was decisive. Together, they turned a potential podium, or better, into a distant fourth and fifth.
The Hamilton strategy call was the most contentious single moment.
Running second when a virtual safety car was triggered by Oscar Piastri‘s retirement, Ferrari brought him in for a third stop.
Verstappen and Antonelli, who stayed out, jumped him on the road; Hamilton then had to fight Antonelli for track position and was later hit with the five-second pitlane penalty that dropped him behind Leclerc.
Hamilton was blunt about it afterwards: “I would never have stopped if it meant that I was giving up track position. I think if [I’d stayed out] we probably would have lost out to Max, probably, but most likely it would have been P3. It would have still been much better.”
The switch to softs cost Hamilton a shot at third place
Grand Prix Photo
Vasseur defended the call, arguing the team had used Verstappen’s stint as a reference and judged the soft tyre worth the undercut given how old Hamilton’s hard tyres already were.
Leclerc’s afternoon was a strategy-free version of the same problem: a car that simply wasn’t consistent enough. He described the SF-26 as strong in the opening stint on hards and again late on softs, but erratic in between.
“There were too many ups and downs,” he said. “It’s just a little bit strange how uncorrelated everything is.”
Vasseur’s own explanation — that the mediums simply didn’t work for the car in race trim, even as the softs did — pointed to the same underlying issue: a car whose pace, on this occasion, was much harder to predict than its qualifying form suggested.
A pattern, not a one-off?
The question Ferrari will need to ask is whether Hungary was really an isolated case of bad execution, or evidence of something more structural.
Leclerc himself drew the connection: Ferrari has now finished on the podium at the two most recent rounds it went into as the supposed underdog — Silverstone and Spa — and stumbled at the one race it was tipped to dominate.
“Both cars seem to have that tendency of being good in the weekend where we expected to struggle, and struggling in the weekend where we thought we would be good,” he said.
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That is a stranger and more troubling admission than any single strategic misstep, because it suggests Ferrari’s read of its own car’s competitiveness, and by extension its preparation for a given weekend, is currently unreliable in either direction.
In that sense, Hungary was similar to Monaco, where nearly the entire paddock expected Ferrari to dominate, only to see Antonelli emerge as the leading force.
Whatever the cause, the number that matters is the one on the standings table.
Antonelli’s third place stretched his lead over Hamilton from 45 to 50 points, while Ferrari’s one-point gain over Mercedes in the constructors’ fight barely moved the needle given what was on the table.
That on a day where George Russell had to recover from a disastrous start, and on a circuit where the Maranello squad had everything in its favour to achieve a much better result.
Vasseur was at pains to note Ferrari still outscored Mercedes on the day, but a weekend that began with a genuine shot at a third win for the SF-26 ended instead as a missed opportunity that, in a title fight this tight, Ferrari can ill afford to repeat.
Pablo has been covering motorsport (mainly F1 and MotoGP) as an editor and writer for over 20 years, having worked for Autosport and Motorsport.com before joining Motor Sport Magazine.
