After a thrilling qualifying session at the Hungarian Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes took the pole position for the first time since the 2021 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, beating Max Verstappen and Lando Norris by 0.003 and 0.085s respectively.
Photo credit: Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team
Hamilton made it through the risky early exchanges in a session where Pirelli’s “Alternative Tyre Allocation” was in effect, forcing hard tyres for Q1, medium tyres for Q2, and soft tyres for Q3 (Saudi Arabia 2021). He then It’s the top of the last shootout and his first pole position in 34 races. Verstappen, who was unable to gain any additional time, dropped to second place by just 0.003 seconds due to Hamilton’s improvement on his second run. Norris, who was joined in third place by rookie teammate Oscar Piastri, continued McLaren’s outstanding performance.
After the session, the seven-time World Champion admitted that he didn’t expect the performance of his car by saying: “It’s been a crazy year and a half.”
“So, I’ve lost my voice from shouting so much in the car. It’s amazing, that feeling. I feel so grateful to be up here because the team have worked so hard.
“We’ve been pushing so hard over this time to finally get a pole; it just feels like the first time.
“And a big, big thanks to the crowd here. We have such an amazing crowd every year here in Budapest.
“I didn’t expect coming today that we would be fighting for pole. So, when I went into that last run, I gave it absolutely everything. There was nothing left in it.”
“Honestly it feels like my first pole, believe it or not. I know it’s been a lot and it feels strange to say that when it’s 104 but, I don’t remember the last time that I had a pole. It feels so long ago, and we were not expecting that.”
Photo credit: Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team
This result marks his ninth pole in Hungary, the first in 595 days; a result that was needed to boost the Brackley-based Team’s spiritTeam’s a rocky two years. On the impact of his achievement, he said: “There’s been ups and downs, it’s a big, big roller coaster ride.
“But none of us have lost faith. We’ve all just united together. We’re focusing on trying to steer the car into that direction.
“Today, we were losing time in Turn four and 11 compared to the others, so I just sent it and hope that I stayed on track.
“But it has been tough. And it’s going to continue to be tough moving on from here. But I think hopefully this shows that we’re on the right track. And we can do it if we just keep pushing.
“We didn’t have an upgrade or anything like that, we made small tweaks to our rear wing and the front wing, but the car felt terrible yesterday, we did some really great work overnight and we were relieved to see that it felt good this morning.”
With a fast Red Bull and a consistent McLaren right behind him, Hamilton has a huge task to accomplish tomorrow. On his plan for the race, he added: “I think tomorrow we’ll just study as hard as we can.
“We’ll bring our A game tomorrow as a team. It’s gonna be difficult to fight these two guys [Verstappen and Norris].
“Lando has been doing a mega job, it’s been great to see Mclaren up there battling and Max, he’s always up there, he’s always doing his thing.
“I would say, what I’ve been searching for in this car, is to get confidence to be able to really send it. I know how to do a fastest lap, pretty much everywhere, but there are ones that are more natural and this is one of those tracks.
“Today, with that last run, I knew I only needed a tenth or more to get ahead of these guys, and I just sent it. I was like ‘nothing to lose, just give it absolutely everything you got’.
“I threw it into the high speed corners trying to match their speed and hope it wasn’t too far off but, it was a great great lap.”
Hamilton managed to clinch the pole by a very small margin from Verstappen, and he expressed his surprise over their new upgrade not performing the way they expected plus how their DRS advantage seems to have gone away.
“Obviously I think they’ve slowed down quite a bit, from the beginning of the year. I mean, just looking at the DRS, they don’t have the DRS advantage, all of a sudden, that they used to have; where did that go?
“They just had an upgrade so you’d expect them to take another step; we heard it was around two-tenths or something like that, for them to not be able to extract that in qualifying is interesting. But I think in the race they’re still the quickest.
“It’ll be very hard to beat them tomorrow. We were just as surprised as everybody else; definitely interesting to see some of the deficits and how it’s changed from race to race and how it’s closed.”
