Ferrari looked like the team to beat at the Hungaroring after Hamilton and Leclerc topped the two practice sessions on Friday, with the SF-26 showing impressive pace on a circuit that suited its strengths.
Hamilton then narrowly missed pole position to McLaren’s Lando Norris by just 12 milliseconds in qualifying. However, a three-place grid penalty dropped the seven-time world champion down the starting order, making Ferrari’s task much harder on race day.
McLaren quickly took control of the race as Oscar Piastri made a strong start and led the way, while Ferrari’s afternoon gradually fell apart. Hamilton briefly gained ground through an undercut during the first round of pit stops, only to lose the position back to Max Verstappen. Further strategy mistakes and Hamilton’s five-second penalty for speeding in the pit lane added to Ferrari’s frustrations.
Vasseur did not hide his disappointment after the race.
“It’s difficult to fully understand the pace because I think that clean air is key,” he said.
“Firstly, it’s not a good Sunday, because when you are one-two on Friday, you expect much more than P4 and P5. On top of that, we made too many mistakes, starting from the start, with the penalty, with the fact that Max overtook us on track, and each time we did a pit stop, we lost a position by 0.2 or 0.3 seconds.”
Despite the disappointing result, Vasseur believes Ferrari’s overall speed was much stronger than it had been at Silverstone and Spa-Francorchamps.
“I think the pace was better, the pure pace. The pure pace of the team was much better this weekend than Spa or Silverstone,” he said.
“We were in front in FP1 and FP2. We were able to fight for pole with Lewis and lost it by a hundredth of a second.”
The Ferrari boss believes the race could have unfolded very differently had Leclerc managed to hold second place through the opening corners.
“The execution was very poor,” Vasseur said. “If we had a good start from the first row, the race would have been completely different. It was more about the execution today than the pace.”
Vasseur stopped short of claiming Ferrari had the speed to beat Norris, who dominated once he had clear air at the front.
“What is clear is that Lando was very, very quick, much more than Oscar,” he said.
“When we were behind Oscar, we were probably faster than him. Lando, when he was on his own, was flying.
“With these cars, it’s difficult to know your true pace when you don’t have clean air. I don’t know if we could have won, but if Charles had been P2 at Turn 1, it could have been a very different race for us.”
