Hungarian Grand Prix Qualifying: Top three press conference transcript

Lando Norris claimed pole for the Hungarian Grand Prix with a last-gasp lap, pipping Lewis Hamilton by 0.012s. The McLaren driver said Ferrari had been quick throughout qualifying, but credited his team’s upgrades for helping him return to the front at a circuit where track position is crucial.

Hamilton had held provisional pole after the opening Q3 runs but failed to improve on his final attempt. The Ferrari driver felt the decision to send him out first was questionable and said the grip disappeared when it mattered. 

Charles Leclerc completed the top three, finishing 0.226s behind Hamilton. He admitted a change in wind caught him out and said he had not adjusted the setup well enough. After a messy session and yellow-flag disruption in Q2, Leclerc felt third was the maximum possible result.

Hamilton was penalised after Qualifying for impeding Oscar Paistri and will drop down three places for tomorrow's race grid.

Post-Qualifying press conference transcript featuring pole winner Lando Norris (McLaren), P2 Lewis Hamilton (Ferrari) and P3 Charles Leclerc (Ferrari), with parc ferme interviews conducted by David Coulthard.

Lando Norris: Yeah, thanks. Very, very happy. Very happy to be back on top. A tough qualifying. Obviously, these guys here were very quick, and it’s been pretty tight the whole weekend. But we’ve seemed quick from the first laps that we did, and we brought a few upgrades. It’s hard to know how much it helps in terms of lap time, but it certainly helped today. So, yeah, very, very happy to be back on top, especially at a track where you certainly want to be on pole.

LN: I mean, honestly, I had confidence the whole of today. My laps in Q3 were not the best, even the one at the end, so I’m pleasantly surprised to be on top. But we’ve been doing a good job. The car’s been feeling good. I’ve had good confidence. I certainly pushed it a little bit more on the last lap. Some paid off, some didn’t, but the main thing is we did it in the end. So, I’m very, very pleased for the team. A big thanks to them for working so hard and, yeah, another big job for tomorrow.

Lewis Hamilton: Yeah, firstly, congratulations to Lando. It was a great lap. We’ve been doing a great job all weekend. I felt solid throughout qualifying and, yeah, for some reason… I mean, we went out first, which I don’t think was the right call. But then, on top of that, the grip for some reason wasn’t there on that last lap, I think for both Charles and me. And, yeah, it’s obviously a track that I love. I think we’re obviously competitive, but I think tomorrow is going to be a hard day.

LH: I mean, ultimately, yeah. We were quickest throughout qualifying, so it definitely got away from us. I think my mind is just elsewhere right this second because, at the end, once I finished my lap, I don’t know if I got in the way of someone. So, I’m just trying to run that through my mind because I wasn’t aware anyone was coming.

Charles Leclerc: I mean, today there was quite a bit of a wind change, and I don’t think I did a great job anticipating it with the car set-up. I felt a little bit off from this morning, and then qualifying has been quite messy, to be honest. We’ve been a bit unlucky in Q2 with a yellow flag in the last sector, and then we were kind of trying too… We were playing catch-up, but the pace was never at the level of Lewis. So, yeah, it was all about trying to maximise today, and I felt I kind of did it.

LN: Yeah, it certainly is. I mean, I’m in the best position for it, of course, but these guys get good starts. They’ve been fast all season, so I’m still expecting a tough race. Obviously, they did Q1 on the medium, so it’ll be interesting to know what tyre they’re going to start on tomorrow. They may potentially be in a slightly better position with some things. But otherwise, we did the job that we had to do today, so I’m pleased with that. Tonight, we’ll make sure we prepare in the best way possible for tomorrow.

LN: How was it? It was good enough for pole. It wasn’t my finest. Honestly, just difficult to put a lap together here, that’s for sure, with the new tarmac and it being grippy in places and not grippy in others. At times, it feels like a bit of a lottery in certain corners. But I certainly did a good amount of the lap, the best I’ve done. I had the confidence to push more and push more. I kind of got into unexplored territory with what happens to the balance when I push it to that next level, and I lost a bit of time in a couple of places. So, if I had a third run, I certainly think I could have gone quite a chunk better, but I didn’t have a third run. Still, very happy nonetheless to be here again. It’s been a while, and I’ve felt confident all weekend, so it’s nice to be able to turn it into something like that.

LN: I was confident. I knew I could do it, honestly. My first lap was also not the best. I just had a big snap of oversteer in Turn 12, so Turn 13 I messed up, and Turn 14 I was basically drifting. So I knew I could go quite a bit better. I was surprised my last lap was not better, but again, I tried to push it more. That’s why I say, with a third attempt, I think I would have understood the best of both worlds. But as I sat in the garage, I knew the pace was certainly there. It has been all weekend. Even though these guys have been insanely fast, I knew I’d been driving very well, I’d been consistent, and I knew the car had potential. We also had the upgrades this weekend, and it doesn’t feel that different, but it certainly seems to be going a little bit quicker, and that’s always a good thing.

LN: Let’s just wait and see. I mean, it’s just qualifying. It’s a long race ahead tomorrow, and it’s going to be a difficult one, so we’ll see. Certainly, if we just go back to Spa last weekend, like I said then, I thought I had good enough pace to certainly not be on pole, but certainly fight for a podium and potentially a win, just in terms of pace. I obviously didn’t, but the potential was there. It’s nice to see that’s kind of carried over to this weekend. We brought some good upgrades, like I said, and that potential has turned into a result, which is always a very nice thing to see for the whole team and very good for the motivation and the atmosphere within the team. It’s rewarding to see work going in and rewards being taken out. So, very pleased for all of them. But you can’t just rely on one good qualifying, so I need a good race tomorrow. Then we obviously have a nice summer break, but after that we need to try and repeat it several more times. We’ve been working hard. We know we’ve been on the back foot, but we’re making progress, and today certainly shows that.

LN: I mean, it’s not particularly relevant. At the end of the day, Lando did the job and did a great lap, and I didn’t on the last one. It is what it is.

LH: I don’t know why we went first, and that was a bit of a shock to me. I definitely wouldn’t have chosen to go first, but it is what it is. I had a clean out-lap, and when I started my lap, already into Turn 1 I had a snap and I was already a tenth and a half down. It just cascaded from there. So, the last lap was the worst lap of all, and all the other laps were really good. We clearly had the car to be on pole today, and I just didn’t deliver. So that’s tough to swallow.

LH: I think the car is just strong all around. I think the team have done a really great job, and a really big thank you to everyone back at the factory for continuing to push and to bring parts each weekend. We’re continuously innovating and evolving the car. It’s night and day different to the car that we had last year, and I’m grateful to have pushed the car to this point and helped develop the car to this point, that we’re fighting at the front for wins. But it’s awfully close between the top runners, and you need to be perfect ultimately to get that first place.

CL: No, I’d say it slipped away from Q1, to be honest. Getting into the car, the feeling wasn’t great, and then it was just a messy session overall. We had to put, I think, two new sets on in Q2, and then it was just kind of tricky from the beginning. Turn 1 and Turn 12 are the question marks I have going out of qualifying, and I’ll have to analyse the data. I’ve been off by maybe two tenths between the two, throughout the whole qualifying, and I didn’t truly find a solution to it. So that was a bit of a shame, but that was purely driving. I’ll look into it and try to understand.

CL: The long-run pace was actually very, very strong, so that’s good. But again, it’s difficult to take for granted what we’ve seen yesterday because everybody seems to have made a big step forward from yesterday to today. So I expect it to be much tighter tomorrow in the race.

LN: It’s just been difficult all weekend in the last sector. I think you can just look at any onboard, and the last two corners, Turns 13 and 14, have been very difficult to get right. It feels like either you under-drive it, or you push it a little bit more and you’re hustling, the rear is letting go, you push, understeer, snaps. So, it was just very difficult to know how much to push and not push. Also, because the track is pretty broken up in places and there are a lot of different patches of tarmac in Turn 1 and Turn 12, I struggled to get a consistent feeling of what was best or what the car was doing every time in these kinds of corners. Turn 1 and Turn 12, honestly, were our biggest losses to the Ferraris every single lap, in braking and cornering speed. We just cannot match them in these very slow-speed corners, which we know from Monaco and various other tracks. We know that we struggle in these kinds of corners. But the tarmac is certainly trickier than last year. It’s normally relatively high grip and very smooth. Certainly, this year it’s quite a bit trickier, with the newer tarmac, which is worse than the old tarmac. It makes it quite difficult to get a good balance, basically. It’s the same for everyone. It’s just a good challenge.

LH: I was told literally when he was at the apex behind me, so I had no idea he was coming. I thought everyone was on an out-lap. Everyone came out behind me. I was the first out, so I thought everyone had finished their lap. Charles, I think, was the car that was behind me when I left the pit lane, as far as I was aware. So, yeah, crazy, because it had been clean, and obviously it wasn’t intentional.

CL: Honestly, I was just struggling for grip. I got kind of the same snap as I had every lap into Turn 1, but bigger, and lost quite a lot there. From that moment onwards, the rears were just not in the right window anymore. But I think, as Lando was saying, for me, Turn 1 and Turn 12, where there was new tarmac, I was really struggling to get the right feeling with the car and to anticipate what the car would do. I did not do a good job on that last lap in Q3. On top of that, I felt like we were a little bit down on grip, so we need to see whether we did anything different on the out-lap, because sometimes it relies on very small details.

LH: No.

LN: No. Just the inside is dirtier, so we don’t really want to start there. But not that I know of. I don’t know. I don’t run in the shade to try to cool the tyres or anything. Maybe I should!

LH: No, nothing to add.

CL: I think it makes a big difference, obviously, when it’s raining and you want to drive as quickly as possible, but in those conditions, I think it’s kind of irrelevant.

LN: We pretty much changed nothing, honestly, from yesterday to today. Just the wind changed, like Charles said, and the wind direction favours the overall direction of the circuit. It makes Sector 2 a lot better. We were so quick in Sector 2 yesterday, honestly, but it certainly helped us in Sector 3 today because we lack rear grip compared to the Ferraris in very slow speed, or just overload, I would say, at very slow speed. Having the wind in a better direction for some of these corners and the entry to the last corner limited our losses, let’s say. I think we still struggled there compared to them. Sector 3 was always our worst sector by a huge margin. It was just less so today. So, we didn’t change the car. We went from really struggling with the balance yesterday, with the rear, to just saying, “let’s see what the wind does overnight and see how much it can help us out.” It certainly helped us out quite a big amount. So, it shows how sensitive the car is to the wind, and I think the cars in general are sensitive to the wind. But because we suffer with the rear, and we suffer with the rear more than these cars, today suited us maybe a little bit more. It just helped us out a little bit more.

CL: Based on today, Lando seems to be very, very strong, so I’ll say Lando. But if you look over the course of the season, Mercedes has always been up there, so I do not doubt that they’ll all be in the fight tomorrow as well.

LH: Just misparked.