Luke’s Weekend Review – Hungarian GP 2023

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Hungarian GP Race Recap: Verstappen Triumphs, Alonso's Masterful Defense, and Ricciardo's Impressive Comeback

Hungary 7

Round 12 is over, we see some drama in the start, great recovery drives, some great defending records broken and a broken trophy.

The start of the race was very busy as we see quite a few events happening, looking at the front of the grid to start with we see Max Verstappen have a very good start and on the run to turn 1 he managed to stay alongside Lewis Hamilton and managed to make it past him by the exit of turn 1, behind them Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri were looking for ways to take advantage of this and much like Austria, Lando Norris was blocked behind Hamilton and could get past, Oscar Piastri on the other hand saw a gap and followed Max through to 2nd place past Hamilton as well. Norris by turn 2 also managed to make it past Hamilton which made Hamilton go from 1st to 4th in 2 turns.

Further behind on the start we see Zhou Guanyu have a poor start which seems to have caused some issues, Valtteri Bottas wasted no time and quickly made it around Zhou and Zhou dropped down the field due to the anti-stall and was trying to make up ground again, coming into the braking zone to turn 1 however, Zhou went into Daniel Ricciardo which in turn went into the back of Esteban Ocon who went over the back wheel of his teammate Pierre Gasly dropping both Alpines and Ricciardo towards the back of the grid. Gasly was forced into the pits to retire at the end of that lap as he had severe damage on the back right section of his car and a lap later we see Ocon also having to come into the pits to retire as the incident ended Ocon with a broken seat who also had to go to the medical centre to get checked out. Zhou picked up a 5 second penalty for causing this incident however it was Alpine who suffered the most here with another double DNF much like Silverstone.

Later in the race Fernando Alonso shows us once again what a defensive masterclass looks like in Hungary as he was doing an excellent job holding Sergio Perez behind him much like he did a couple years back when he defended against Hamilton when he was driving for Alpine and landed Ocon his first win in F1. This time however after a couple laps of fighting, Alonso realised that this wasn’t his fight today and you can say that he let Perez past into turn 1 as he never defended the move at all. Perez at this stage was on the Hard tyres as he planned to do a longer stint and we have to say that this year-round the Hard tyres seemed to be a much better race tyre than it was last year here at the Hungaroring.

After the 1st lap ordeal, Ricciardo got back into the groove and put his head down and after a couple of pitstops one of which he pitted only after 11 laps he managed to recover back to 13th where he originally started ahead of his teammate who finished 2 positions behind in 15th. I would say this was a great start on his return to F1 after being out of a seat for the first 10 races of this season. If he keeps performing the way he did on this race I have no doubt that we could potentially see Ricciardo back as Verstappen’s teammate.

Lewis Hamilton's Rollercoaster Race, George Russell's Remarkable Recovery, and the Shattered Trophy: Hungarian GP Highlights

Lewis Hamilton would probably want to forget this race fairly quickly given the start of the race and as if that wasn’t enough on lap 36 he was being told to lift and coast due to the car overheating and the race for Hamilton was looking like it was over, however towards the closing stages of the race, Hamilton was looking very much alive as he started coming back fairly quick making it past the Mclaren of Oscar Piastri and nearly got back on the podium as he was only a second or so away from Sergio Perez after the pair had another battle earlier on where Perez came out on top as well.

We must talk about George Russell who yesterday in qualifying got very unlucky and had to start the race in 18th place. This however didn’t stop Russell from driving a beautiful recovery drive and finish in 6th ahead of both Ferraris with some beautiful overtakes along the way. Russell’s drive was something I enjoyed watching today and I think he was deserving of the Driver of the day in my opinion, however he only got 8.4% of the votes today.

The Ferraris today were in a race for themselves as there wasn’t much happening for them, they started the race in 6th and 11th and they finished in 6th and 7th in the race with nearly no action whatsoever, however Charles Leclerc did manage to recover quite well from one of his pitstops as the team had some issues tightening one of the wheels which left him stationary for 9.3 seconds and in the pit after that he was caught speeding in the pitlane which bagged him a 5 second and still managed to finish in 6th where he started the race ahead of his teammate Carlos Sainz.

Down at Mclaren we see that the team is keeping up their superior performance they showed in Silverstone as for the first few stints of this race they were keeping up with Verstappen’s pace and were running in 2nd and 3rd for over the halfway point of the race. Both Norris and Piastri showed tremendous pace with Norris bagging his 2nd podium in a row which was his first consecutive podium in his F1 career. Oscar on the other hand managed to finish in 5th which is quite good given the near crash he had earlier in the race with Perez as he was pushed a bit wide and off the track dipping his tyres in the grass where Piastri managed to control the car well and keep going. That incident was investigated by the stewards, but no further investigation was the result for that.

We take a look now at Sergio Perez who started on the hard tyres in 9th and after an impressive drive and a good few overtakes he managed to get himself on the podium and bagging the Driver of the Day award for his drive, he had a few good battles on track which got him to where he got and a late charge on Norris saw him tentatively close to 2nd place however he was unable to get close enough to Lando to attempt an overtake as towards the end Perez found himself having to pick up the pace even more to protect his podium against Hamilton who was closing in fast in the closing stages of the race. His teammate Max on the other hand after managing to get past Hamilton on turn 1 on the first lap had no worry whatsoever as he led every lap of this race and also the fastest lap finishing over 33 seconds ahead of Lando and over a minute from 5th place which is mad when you think about it. This win meant that Red Bull broke the record of the most consecutive wins as a team.

The record Red Bull broke wasn’t the only thing that broke this weekend however, on the podium as Norris slammed his champagne bottle to fizz it up as is becoming his signature move, Verstappen’s trophy falls off the top step of the podium and shatters. Lando and Max are both seen on the podium covering their mouth when they realised what happened and both social media teams for Red Bull and Mclaren both posted about this incident.

Who do you think was the biggest winners and the biggest losers of the Hungarian GP? We now head to Belgium for the legendary race in Spa.

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