Nico Hulkenberg (GER) Sahara Force India F1 VJM08.
Hungarian Grand Prix, Saturday 25th July 2015. Budapest, Hungary.
An incident filled Hungarian Grand Prix won by Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel. How would you rate the 2015 Hungarian Grand Prix?
thejudge13
F1: Daily International News roundup, inside whispers and insight together with thoughts and opinion
This race had everything.
-Brilliant start by Seb
-Shocking from the Mercedes
-Lewis looked like the Lewis of 2011
-no podium finish for a Mercedes car going all the way back to Australia 2014
-Pastor Maldonado getting every single penalty you could think of
-Kimi just can’t get a break
-Both McHonda in the points
– and despite all that, Lewis still increased his lead in the championship. I hope he buys Ricciardo a few drinks tonight.
Really enjoyed that race.
*sorry meant to have said no Mercedes podium ending a run which started in Australia 2014.
LOL re Lewis buying Ric a drink or two 😛
If the points he gained today wins him the championship, I’d suggest he loan him the jet..😂😂
Good post. I agree.
Did you just agree with me?….. That’s it, I’m going to join the Borg collective….😂😂😂
Should we reveal to the community that we’re actually friends?
Nah…
Verstappen 4th, Alonso 5th.. Honda > Mercedes in a race finish, what on earth?!
10 out of 10. Vettel/ferrari win. Drama. Sensation. Mchonda doing better than I’d ever imagined. Mercedes beaten fair and square. Best race of the season.
Hard to remember a more interesting and event filled race.
Really bad day for Williams.
Nico is the most overrated driver on the grid. Today we had a glimpse of what he does without the fastest car and has to fight for it. And yet he was beat by Hamilton, who had his worse race since God knows when.
Say what you want, Nico is nothing but a less error prone Webber.
And a total coward when it came to tyres for the last stint. Should’ve had the soft to attack forward not the hard to maintain station. Chicken.
I tend to agree with you as far as Nico’s choice of the Medium instead of the Soft in the last stint.
However the numbers tell a different story.
Nico was faster on the Medium tire.
If you average all their green laps together, over all sessions of the weekend,
Hamilton averaged 94.685 a lap on the Mediums.
Rosberg averaged 91.013.
Hamilton averaged 89.100 on the Softs.
Rosberg averaged 91.098.
So Rosberg was essentially running the same lap time regardless of the tire, but he couldn’t match Lewis on the Soft.
+1 for an argument based on data. That is pretty shocking how slow Rosberg was on Soft. Was any other driver showing so little difference on the two compounds? Seems very odd for two drivers in the same car to have that much difference.
My all-new and ridiculously complete data table is going to be up and running soon, including lap times, but for the moment…..
The Ferrari’s, FI, Lotus, and Mclarens were all very close, not more than a second difference between drivers regardless of tire.
And all those teams were between 1.5 and 2 sec slower on the Medium
Though the ferraris were THE FASTEST on the soft:
88.835 for Vettel,
88.443 for Raikkonen over the whole weekend
Kvyat was running
91.467 ave on the Medium
88.938 ave on the soft
Ricciardo
90.027 on the medium
88.453 on the soft
Verstappen
91.419 medium
89.453 soft
Chilli
94.868 medium
90.592 soft
There’s so much more….
@Tourdog: Those are some shockingly large differences between teammates… can’t wait for the updated data table (and thanks for making the effort of putting such a large amount of data together)
There is context here though. The soft tyres have a limited life and depending at what point he pitted they may not have lasted long enough. Circumstances contrived to push Merc in to a snap decision to stop at which point they had no time to think or change the tyres which were already ready to be fitted.
It may well be that had Hulkenberg not had his front wing issue the team and driver would have discussed things over a few laps and once they were in the window for the soft to last to the end have changed the strategy. The team did question his decision to match Lewis so possibly common sense would have prevailed.
Really, the error was to dive for the pits as soon as the crash happened. They would have been better taking a lap to think about things – after all, the point of the VSC is it is supposed to ensure there are no big gains or losses in lap time so taking that extra lap should not have cost them any time.
By pitting when they did and without time to understand the consequences of the crash the medium tyres were hard to say no to. At that point they were the only option to be sure of getting to the end. Had they seen the amount of debris it would have been obvious there would be a delay of several laps which would have changed things but with so little time it is hard to make these decisions.
Maybe because the VSC is so new the teams just haven’t had time to get used to and think through the scenarios involved?
So a conservative initial decision became a forced bad one. In different circumstances it would have played out differently. If the crash had happened 10 seconds earlier or later a different choice may have been made.
And running over Ricciardo’s frontwing was just stupid behaviour, a risk he should not have taken.
10 for me. Good race. Enjoyed it.
What a start from the Ferrari’s. In relation to the WDC, Hamilton is quite fortunate Ricciardo collected Rosberg in the end. Hamilton was, by far, the fastest here this weekend. His pre-race build up was absolutely faultless and he was just astonishingly quick. But that race performance, overall… just terrible
Congrats to Sebastian for equalling Senna’s 41 F1 GP victories… and on his first win at Hungary. For perspective; despite Prost being 10 victories away, Schumacher is 50 victories away.
I think it was Nico who collected Ric. He chopped across his nose, guess he wanted wanted to make a point to Ric as well…… Oops!
And all at the BBC where yelling that nothing could go wrong for hamilton. After such a weekend the race was only his to win.
At that track, I would never say anything can’t go wrong for anyone. 1 win from pole in the last 11 years, pretty much sums it up.
Exactly what I said to the misses. And funny how the dullest track (considered by many) gave us the most exciting race.
Do you not think this is an exception rather than a rule. Because F1 is so technologically driven they can predict almost everything.
Chuck Maldonado… Sorry, unpredictability in and boom! Cracking race.
Bahrain 2014, Hungary 2014/2015.. even the last Valencia race was a cracker!
Question now is, will it be Vettel or Hamilton behind Schumacher for wins when all is said and done? Hamilton would have to be the current favourite, but who knows what’ll happen on rules and car development in the next few years.
Also, including NC wins, Fangio 48, Clark 44, Moss 37, adds some nice benchmarks to be beaten. Stewart on 32.. gives a nice looking top 10 F1 drivers list.
Give my their relative age, that might go to Seb.
True, Hamilton is 30.5, Vettel 28, so a 2.5 year difference, but given how Seb started earlier and is only .5 seasons behind Lewis I can see them roughly both retiring at the same time.
Regarding the Ric/Ros thing, I was surprised that they didn’t decide to give Rosberg a penalty, but I imagine they factored in the dive-bomb approach by Ricciardo. Tyres locked, nowhere near any form of line – if it had been Verstappen there would be countless comments about how immature and disrespectful he is as a driver. I’m a big fan of Ricciardo, but he didn’t really help himself with that situation.
Ric did the only thing he could do which was send a prayer up the inside. He did a good job by not hitting Rosberg and all Rosberg had to do was watch his mirrors as he came out of the corner … Rosberg didn’t do that and came across Ric HARD, hence the incident.
Daniel’s move could be considered ridiculous on account of how unlikely it would work, but he didn’t hit Rosberg and really it was no big deal when he locked up and went deep into the middle of the corner. It was only in the very last bit of the corner that the incident occurred.
Gave it a 10 but want my money back after having to endure Bernie and Christian on my telly at the same time!
I assume the people who voted it a 2 were Maldonado fans?
We’ll see with driver of the weekend poll..
“Did more laps through the pits than on track.” Brilliant!
Great job by Vettel.
Lewis f*cked it up and was frustrating to watch. Nico’s performance and pace was embarrassing. Exact same tyres as seb and in the same condition after the restart yet couldn’t make a move.
The Ferrari was definitely the faster car today. Before the safety car Rosberg was something like 20 seconds back on Vettel
No way, did you see hamilton’s pace after getting past massa in the first stint? He was quicker than Vettel even though he had spent all that time in massa’s dirty air. Rosberg was disastrously slow today. The merc was definitely quicker.
Hamilton gained exactly 0 seconds on vettel after he passed massa. And in fact started to lose a lot of time because he overcooked his tires, whereas ferraris in front were pacing themselves.
check again. After clearing Massa, he was the fastest man on track, he even set the fastest lap of the race during that time.
because ferraris were saving their options up front. Hamilton went flat out and ruined his tires in something like 8 laps after he passed massa. He then lost more time as a result of that than he had gained up before.
Bottom line: ferrari could go quicker up front, but didn’t.
That’s cuz he knew he was 3 stopping
The Ferrari was faster than the #6 Mercedes, I wouldn’t go as fas saying they were the fastest.
What seems to be missing in all the (expected) fan-boy rants above re- the Merc drivers is the acknowledgement that Rosberg had been suffering understeer from FP1 all the way through to Q3. Assuming that no magic had been applied to dial it out during parc ferme between qualifying and the race, it’s not surprising that he was off the pace compared with Hamilton, who was clearly more comfortable with his set-up.
Alternatively, it could be because Our Hero is the greatest driver ever to don an over-sized baseball cap, whereas Rosberg isn’t worthy to pilot a London bus.
The truth is out there somewhere……..
And whose fault was it that their car wasn’t setup to their liking?
He had 3 FP sessions to resolve the issue and he didn’t. Which I find hard to understand given his insane work ethic to micro-analyse everything.
So yea you’re right, he isn’t worthy to pilot a London bus.
The truth is, the hero in the oversized baseball cap is making the Ivy League calibre driver looking ridiculous.
#blamerenault!
This is a reply to your comment to me at 19:42.
You seem to be implying that it’s only the driver that does the car set up. That may come as news to not only those people sweating it out in the garage, but also all the data crunchers back at the team base.
If you watched the FP sessions you will have heard many instances (either directly on team radio or reported by the commentators – SKY that is, no idea about others) of Rosberg asking his crew to check various parameters in an attempt to get to the bottom of the problem. To me, that suggests that whatever the team was doing to/ with the car – and I doubt that they were doing nothing – was not working. Short of him wielding a set of spanners and a torque wrench himself, I’m not sure what else he could be expected to contribute.
Still, let us not permit the real world to intrude where it is so obviously not wanted.
Really fortis96….surely the fastest car won on the day? I am pretty sure that the Ferrari did the race in the quickest time.
Hic….what a race…hic….just goes to show what older tracks can still produce.hic… In the past the race has been a very hard one to manage,just look at the upset that Damon threw our way in the Arrows…hic..then only to have it snatched away thanks to a 10p o ring..hic… Nico has probably thrown away his only chance of taking and holding the lead today,a school boy error and not one that should be done by a top level driver..hic..Lewis had the worst race of a couple of years and still magaed to increase his lead..hic…but in all a damn fine race.and hic..why?.,.because my stable WON!! Yeah,yippee,.hic,hic (don’t get to say that often so pls excuse my drunken ramblings)..hic..hic..
I think I’ve figured out why the Merc’ have been having problems with their starts lately, I think they’ve employed Webber as the teams new start engineer.
They need Dr. Marko as the Merc driver coach after looking at the careers of today’s top four drivers.
They’ve got winners with Wehrlein and Ocon, but it remains to be seen how many million reasons the FIA will need to give Wehrlein his super-licence. 😉
Ricciardo must be using Webber’s old RBR settings for his starts 😀
A bit too much of a demolition derby for me: 7
I give it 9/10 of ten. The result in qualifying was as predictable as you expect this year. Hamilton and Rosberg got 1-2, and Vettel was behind as usual. After the first one lab we had Ferraris leading 1-2. Incredible. All teams had a fair share of good and bad luck. The racing was very close on track. To see Ferrari-STR-STR 1-2-3 finish was incredible. Mercedes got played once again.
Ferrari-RBR-RBR
Absolutely crazy race. Lewis “Calamity” Hamilton somehow extends his championship lead over Nico “Cautious” Rosberg, despite doing his upmost to throw it all away.
Not happy that Bottas got taken out by Mad Max, potential of good points taken away, but based on the Mercedes starts a potential win is on the cards, for Team Claire and also the Marlboro boys, in the next couple of races.
Finally Fred scores some real points, proving what a class driver he is.
I chose a 9 instead of a 10, just because …
well … one of my favourites fell out with a problem. But.
My other favourit ended just outside the podium.
Woohaaa
It’s so difficult! There’s luck and bad luck. There’s the fact that it’s a mechanical sport.
I was fucking entertained, shouted at the tv. But somewhere I feel abused.
Is it DRS?
Mercedes are orchestrating the 2015 season, isn’t it strange that all of a sudden since Silverstone, they can’t get their starts right. In FP1, ROSBERG tried to practice his starts and for some reason his car kongt out..strange! Lewis’s problem was a chain reaction from a bad launch, maybe if he’d kept his composure, he could have challenged Seb for the win, allbeit, mercs know they have the championship in the bag, so kudos to them for coming up with the idea of bad starts to make the season more entertaining!
If they keep it up then, they might have a surprise in their hands…
I think part of the reason is that the rules around clutches change from Spa onward and Mercedes is preparing for that and as a result don’t put as much effort as others on their current clutch. Mercedes will really be in trouble if they still have problems at Spa.
Vettel.
Who demonstrated yet again why Vettel is a four-time World Champion while Hamilton was busy demonstrating yet again why Hamilton isn’t.
A special mention for Sky, which successfully failed to interview either Vettel or Arrivabene (let alone both) after the race and seemed neither to notice this nor to care.
What a race. This was Hungary, for that reason it gets a full 10/10. I’ve lost track over the years of the number of boring races at this track, but yesterdays race was a corker!
Several of the last few races at this track have been good. Compare it to Tilke’s tracks and it’s becoming a classic.