Tire Rules has Everyone Tired at Hungarian GP

Race News

• The Hungarian GP is coming up on Sunday 23. The race will feature a new tire allocation rule, meaning that each driver will have 11 sets of tires instead of the usual 13. Furthermore, the qualifying, (in which the teams normally are free to use whatever tires they want), will now have mandated tires in each shootout, meaning that Q1 will be raced on hard tires, Q2 on the medium and Q3 on the soft. The new rule is a test and is one of the initiatives to make the F1 circus more environmentally friendly. However, the rule has instead been criticized by several drivers, claiming that the rule only results in the teams running less practice laps, ultimately hurting the drivers and the fans showing up on practice days. Time will tell if the rule is here to stay or will be scrapped after the season.

• Free practice 1 and 2 commenced on Friday. Sergio Perez who has been struggling in the last few races, and especially in qualifying, unfortunately shunted his Red Bull into the wall in the first practice session, bringing out the red flags. The Mexican will be looking to quickly forget the day and move on to the next sessions. The conditions have been mixed on Friday, and the weather in combination with the aforementioned tire rules resulted in a rather scattered result, leaving otherwise fast drivers from Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull in the bottom 10 , while the Alpines seized the day and ended up with both cars in the top 5.

Driver news

• Nyck de Vries, who involuntarily became the driver in the spotlight last week, as a result of his widely unexpected sacking from Red Bull racing’s sister team Alpha Tauri has now issued a short and personal official statement regarding his situation, thanking the team for the opportunity and now taking some time off media. News had been circling that he had previously stated that he was disappointed in the situation but “not surprised as Red Bull had already stolen Lewis Hamiltons eight title” along with the statement that he had “already been promised to drive for Red Bull racing alongside Max in 2025”. These statements however have been labeled as fake by his management, as well as by de Vries himself, and are reportedly to be completely disregarded as de Vries had not made any statement what so ever at that point in time.

• As reported by the F1 Summary last week, many former drivers have come to his support in this situation, and they have now been joined by no one less than 4 time world champion, and former Red Bull racing superstar Sebastian Vettel. The now retired German champion has stated that the dismissal of de Vries was “brutal” and hopes that the Dutch driver can be judged by his many past successes as a racing driver and not only by his 10 races as an Alpha Tauri F1 driver. Furthermore, both his former Alpha Tauri teammate Yuki Tsunoda as well as fellow countryman and world champion Max Verstappen have publicly voiced their support for him as well.

Team news

• Red Bull racing have without a question been the dominant team during the 2023 calendar so far. The Milton Keynes outfit have made the new regulations work better than any other team, much to the thanks of their chief technical officer, Adrian Newey, who is praised to be one of the most talented minds in the sport. The team has now been reported to bring an upgraded design to the Hungarian GP, which is supposedly expected to improve the pace by another 0.2 seconds. No team has ever won every race of an F1 season before, but Red Bull are certainly making a run for it this year, having won every race so far and seemingly showing no effort to slow down.

• Mercedes has been struggling to find back to the dominant form that they have made themselves known for in the past. Team principal Toto Wolff has played down the likelihood of the Brackley based team to make any extraordinary steps overnight in the past, and has now been joined by driver Lewis Hamilton, who has stated that due to the immense complexity of the cars will result in the team taking some time to come back to former glory, although he is confident in his team to get there at some point.

Next Race

Coming up on the calendar is the Hungarian Grand Prix on July 23. The start is at 15:00 CET. Click here for the full schedule.

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The F1 Summary