Lewis Hamilton expressed frustration with his Ferrari team after he dropped points in the title battle against Mercedes’s Kimi Antonelli at the Hungarian Grand Prix, while Lando Norris returned to form with the defending world champion’s first race victory of the season.
- Lewis Hamilton questioned Ferrari's late virtual safety car pit call, costing track position and triggering a five-second speeding penalty.
- The penalty dropped Hamilton from fourth to fifth, increasing his points deficit to Kimi Antonelli before the summer break.
- Hamilton has faced several recent penalties and plans to use the shutdown to reset physically and mentally for the season's second half.
- Lando Norris praised McLaren's upgrades, calling his Hungaroring drive one of his best, extracting peak performance each lap.
- Despite the victory, Norris remains far behind Kimi Antonelli in the standings but trusts upgrades will help later.
Hamilton finished in fourth place on track at the Hungaroring, but with a five-second penalty imposed for speeding in the pit lane was classified as fifth in the race won by McLaren’s Norris, with Max Verstappen second for Red Bull and Hamilton’s title rival Antonelli in third.
Hamilton had been called into the pit late in the race by Ferrari for a stop under the virtual safety car, which gave him fresh tyres but cost him track position to Verstappen and Antonelli, which he could not make back and was the stop from which he received the penalty. The call left him questioning strategy decisions by his team.
“It was pretty bad. Pretty frustrating,” he said. “I definitely don’t think we should have taken the stop but the call came literally just before the pit-lane entry and I didn’t have time to debate.
“I would never have stopped if it meant that I was giving up track position. I may have been able to hold on to P2. He [Verstappen] was catching me but most likely it would have been P3 [in front of Antonelli] and it would have been much better. Instead, I lost a bunch of points.”
Hamilton had been 45 points behind Antonelli but now trails the Italian by 50 as the sport enters it summer break. He has also been on the receiving end of a swathe of penalties in recent races including one at Silverstone, one at Spa, a three-place grid drop in Hungary for impeding in qualifying and then pit-lane speeding during the race. He felt the annual shutdown for the sport had come at the right moment.
“I’ll work hard to try and come back, reset,” he added. “There’s still a lot of places to take. I’m going to try and make sure I don’t give them any reason to give any penalties moving forwards.
“It has been an amazing first half given I think we’ve been probably three or four-tenths down on the straights in pace and power for the first half of the season. We’ve got a bit more to come in the second half and we keep on pushing. The second half will be stronger, usually the second half is a stronger period for me. So I’ll really take this time to reset and try and come back stronger, fitter and better mentally prepared.”
Norris, who took his and McLaren’s first win of the year, believes he is now driving at his very best, better even than when he won the title last season, despite being outpaced by what has been a dominant Mercedes over these opening 11 meetings.
“Today I would probably say it was up there with one of my best performances, in terms of extracting performance out of the car and being so close to the limit every single lap,” he said. “So close that the team had to ask me to peg it back a little bit. So although it kind of hurts me saying it because it doesn’t mean that you just win, I feel like I’m doing a better job this year than I was last year, and I have done for a little while.”
The British driver is 91 points behind Antonelli in the championship with 12 races to come. It is a huge mountain to climb but, like Hamilton, Norris felt there was still much to play for in the second half of the season, especially after the significant upgrades McLaren brought to Hungary had proved so effective, even if driving the current F1 cars is still not to his and many drivers’ taste.
“What pleases me the most? The fact we were so quick, the fact the car was very strong today,” he said. “I was just very happy with a lot of things. I mean, the car was still horrible to drive at times but quick and I’d rather have a horrible but quick car than anything else.
“I was convinced I could win the race today and we did. We were just on another level and I felt in a very good flow of things. When the car’s good and when I’m in a good flow, there’s no stopping.”
