Luke’s Weekend Review – Hungarian GP 2023

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 18^th place. This however didn’t stop Russell from driving a beautiful recovery drive and finish in 6^th 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 6^th and 11^th and they finished in 6^th and 7^th 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 6^th 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 2^nd and 3^rd for over the halfway point of the race. Both Norris and Piastri showed tremendous pace with Norris bagging his 2^nd podium in a row which was his first consecutive podium in his F1 career. Oscar on the other hand managed to finish in 5^th 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 9^th 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 2^nd 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 5^th 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.