Friday Report: 2023 Hungarian GP
‘Alternative Tyre Allocation’ throws up intriguing Friday in Budapest
Mixed weather and differing strategic choices made for an interesting first day of running at the Hungaroring.
In FP1, the Team opted to begin on the medium tyre, but rain soon began to fall which curtailed any meaningful dry running.
After both drivers installed the Intermediate tyre, George continued to explore the conditions and ultimately ended the session quickest with a 1:38.795.
The rain cleared for FP2, but scattered cloud kept conditions lower than usual for this time of year. Both drivers headed out on the same Medium tyre they had run in FP2 and focused on single lap pace initially.
As the track continued to ramp up, and others switched to soft tyre running, the Team continued to focus on understanding the Medium compound and long run pace. This left Lewis P16 and George P20 at the close of the session, having forgone use of the soft tyre.
FP1
George Russell | 13 Laps | 1:38.795 | P1 | Medium, Inter |
Lewis Hamilton | 3 Laps | No time | P20 | Medium, Inter |
FP2
Lewis Hamilton | 28 Laps | 1:18.746 | P16 | Medium |
George Russell | 23 Laps | 1:19.175 | P20 | Medium |
Lewis Hamilton
We only used one set of the dry compound tyres today. With the ‘Alternative Tyre Allocation’ format we get less running, which is not ideal from a driver’s perspective. We will have more flexibility in terms of what tyres we run in FP3 tomorrow though.
The car wasn’t feeling great today, but we will be working on the set-up overnight and hopefully make some improvements for tomorrow. We typically start off lacking a little pace. Through the work we do and changes we make, we typically tend to find some more speed as we progress into the weekend. I’m hopeful that tomorrow the car will feel better.
George Russell
We were on a very different programme to everyone else today, only using one set of the medium compound tyre throughout. For FP2, that meant we were running a used medium tyre, so the lap times don’t give a true representation of our pace. I’m sure tomorrow we will be better. We’re just focused on trying to improve and we know we tend to improve as the weekend progress, which is the right way around.
We learned a few interesting things even in that one dry session. We’re struggling with a bit of overall grip and the tyres didn’t feel like they were in the right window on both low fuel and high fuel. We need to understand why that was, but these are difficult things to assess during a session. We will work on that overnight; it wasn’t our best day for sure but that’s not the first time we’ve said that this year. Saturday and Sunday tend to be better so I’m looking forward to the weekend.
Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director
FP1 was not a great deal of use due to the timing of the red flag and then the arrival of the rain. We carried a lightly used set of medium tyres into the second session; we did some work on lower fuel levels but focused more on the long run. Most teams took a second set of tyres today, something we chose not to do. That’s the main reason we don’t feature higher up on the time sheets. The benefit will come in the learning for qualifying, where we have two new sets in FP3.
There’s plenty of work to do with the car balance on both the single lap and long run, which is useful as the field is looking very tight. We also have the challenge of different compounds in each segment of qualifying, meaning the out laps need to be adjusted continuously. We will review all the data tonight and see what we can do tomorrow.