Red Bull seeks its way with new designf
The Hungarian Grand Prix represents a stage of great interest for the current season. The renewed RB20 has showcased a significant update package on Max Verstappen’s car, showing the abandonment of some key features and a return to concepts seen in previous years. It’s a sort of about-face that resembles searching for a path in a labyrinth, where when you hit a dead end, you go back to the previous junction and take a different path. This seems to be what’s happening to the Milton Keynes team, searching for two fundamental aspects with these updates: pure performance, which has recently been eclipsed by McLaren and a resurgent Mercedes, and a more profitable development path for the future, considering that time is starting to run out for defining the chassis concepts of the 2025 car. The track feedback has been decidedly positive, especially regarding the floor, given the excellent performances seen on the track even from Sergio Perez, who only has the new floor from the update package, not the entire upper aerodynamic part of the car. The impression is that the new floor philosophy is ensuring simpler setup and more manageable car behavior, even on curbs and bumps, with evidently greater energy flow in some key passages that ensures better stability of the car’s entire aerodynamic system.
McLaren still very fast, the challenge is open
However, McLaren does not appear particularly less competitive than Red Bull. In fact, Lando Norris registered the best lap time with a significant gap over the competition. The Woking team’s car shows typical high downforce responses, indicating that with high temperatures and the extremely twisty track, Norris and his team aim to minimize car sliding and tire overheating. So far, the MCL38 has often suffered from high temperatures and the so-called rear overheating, the two critical aspects of this Budapest weekend. If Stella’s team proves immune to these problems in this race, it will be further confirmation of an incredibly complete car. Otherwise, Verstappen could regain a performance advantage that had disappeared for several Grands Prix.
The double challenge
We limit ourselves to talking about Norris and Verstappen as the impression from the first day’s data is that the four leading teams are actually divided into two groups, with McLaren and RedBull ahead and Ferrari and Mercedes fighting to be the third force, slightly behind. If this tendency is already noticeable in the short runs, it is even more evident in the race pace simulation.
We see Perez with the best overall simulation, ahead of Norris and Verstappen, while further back are Russell, Sainz, and Hamilton (and Piastri who always struggles a bit with tire management). For now, therefore, Ferrari and Mercedes do not seem to have the pace of the leaders, but if the W15 has so far suffered from the heat and these conditions and therefore it is not a big surprise that it is slightly more in difficulty, the SF24 seems to have a bit more room for improvement, especially in terms of aerodynamic load.
Ferrari with room to improve
From the data, we see that Carlos Sainz’s results seem lower in terms of downforce compared to the competition, a slightly different aspect from what was seen in the first practice sessions and which seems to show an attempt to give a certain priority to qualifying, given the overtaking difficulties on this track and the fact that the intense heat should completely negate the SF24’s tire heating and warm-up issues. Frederic Vasseur‘s acknowledgment to Sky on this matter, with the statement that the qualifying pace seems better than the race pace and that the best balance needs to be found, suggests that Ferrari can work to increase the vertical load and shift the car’s operating point closer to the competition’s race pace, to be able to keep up and perhaps surpass Mercedes during the race. The last two considerations for the Maranello team are that the new modified floor seems a slight step forward, but in the short-run data, Carlos Sainz shows suffering precisely in the two fast points of the track, so the verification of the SF24’s aerodynamic bouncing status will only be possible at Spa. The other point is that Charles Leclerc once again appears to be more in difficulty than his Maranello teammate, both because of the accident and in managing the car, with the number 55 car being decidedly balanced and composed, unlike the number 16, which is more nervous and hyper-reactive, especially at the rear. We therefore wonder if there is a desire to pursue certain types of setups in Leclerc’s garage, or if there is also a certain impermeability between the two garages to the passage of useful information, given what we have already seen on the strategy side. We will see what happens in the third practice session and in qualifying, a crucial stage for the entire weekend.
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