When Ferrari race engineer Bryan Bozzi informed Charles Leclerc via radio that he had secured pole position, even the Monegasque driver found it hard to believe. Leclerc felt he had put together a solid lap, but no one expected the McLaren cars to suddenly collapse with such a large gap on track. Those were conditions that Charles Leclerc skillfully exploited to his advantage, securing a rather unexpected first place on the starting grid. “It wasn’t easy to put together a clean lap; perhaps we were the only ones in Q3 who managed it. We made some setup changes between Q2 and Q3 that took us in the right direction,” the driver told Mara Sangiorgio during an interview.
However, the road to tomorrow’s race is still long, and although overtaking at the Hungaroring is difficult, McLaren can rely on two strong drivers as well as a highly competitive car. “Starting first gives you something to dream about, but now we need to stay calm. I have 27 pole positions but only 8 race wins because usually we perform better on Saturdays than in race pace. With this car, it’s the opposite. Today we did better than expected, as we were aiming for third place. Tomorrow is still to be seen, but this is a very good starting position,” Charles Leclerc added.
“I still don’t fully understand what happened. Qualifying was terrible from the first lap to the penultimate; I felt like we had taken a step backward compared to FP3. I struggled to get out of Q2, but then conditions changed for everyone. I managed to do a good lap and got the most unexpected pole position of my life. It helped that I did my first Q3 run on used tires, while Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri had fresh tires. On the second attempt, the track was different, but I thought the negative feeling was because of the used tires, so I pushed to the maximum while others had to adjust,” the Monegasque driver admitted during the post-qualifying press conference.
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