Gary Anderson's Hungarian Grand Prix insight

As a special exclusive for The Race Members’ Club on Patreon, here are Gary Anderson’s thoughts on this weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix - spanning his expectations for the race and some classic anecdotes from his past visits to the Hungaroring. 

The track in Hungary has always been a unique challenge. It is a high downforce track with lots of slow and medium-speed corners, so requires a high downforce level. But since the front straight was extended in 2003, teams can’t use what is called ‘dirty downforce’. In other words, it is not just a case of replicating Monaco levels of drag and downforce.

Pole position has always been important at any track, but nowhere more so than Monaco and Hungary. Since Formula 1 first went there in 1986, the race has been won from the front row 23 times - 16 of those from pole position - with 12 wins from the second row. It’s only been won from lower than that four times, with Jenson Button’s famous first win for Honda in 2006 the furthest back from 14th.

If we have a decent weekend with weather (and it’s expected that it will be hot this year), this is a track that usually requires what I call a ‘decent’ car. To get pole position, it needs to be well-balanced on new tyres and offer good traction.

The first two long 180-degree corners can usually show how well a driver has managed to get the front tyres into their working window. It’s also very tempting to outbrake yourself there.

The middle sector is the faster part of the track with the exception of the chicane, which is simply a kerb-hopper. The last two 180-degree corners mean you really need to have looked after those rear tyres on a qualifying lap.

My first time there was in 1991 with Jordan. In that period we used Goodyear rubber and for each qualifying session, you had two sets of one-lap qualifying tyres. It was actually worse for qualifying than it is now in that they offered a huge grip increase but you had to do the outlap at a snail’s pace.

As a result, the braking point and entry speed for Turn 1 was very difficult to judge. On many occasions, the driver would end up looking over their right shoulder asking where the apex went.

If you had a disciplined driver, they would simply get through Turn 1 even slower than they had been on new race tyres knowing that the rest of the lap was where you would make up the time when the tyres were up to their maximum performance level. But if you threw away half a second at Turn 1, it was not easy to recover.

You can’t do it now with the tyre rules that prevent sets being mixed and matched, which is a bit sad, but we qualified with Giancarlo Fisichella in 2002 running used fronts and new rears.

The fronts had one qualifying run on them (two slow and one fast lap), then we fitted new rears and went for our second run. That way, the fronts were working for the first two corners and the new rears were still there for the last two corners.

It brings a smile to your face when you can outwit some of the big boys. Fisichella qualified fifth and finished sixth in a car that we normally struggled to get into the top 10 with.

Let’s see who might just spring a surprise this weekend. If Monaco is anything to go by, it should be Charles Leclerc in the Ferrari, but the way they have been going lately it wouldn’t surprise me if they went out in Q1.

The team claims the upgrade package introduced in Spain works well outside of the fast corners where bouncing happens, so this track will at least be a bit better.

But the challenges with the tyres in particular mean this could easily be another one of those weekends where it’s all about who does the best job.

Get the tyres in the right window, look after them around the qualifying lap and you could easily get pole position in a car that might be a tenth or two slower in terms of potential than its rivals.

And this is exactly what we want to see. It should come down to which team and driver gets it right over the weekend. And still more often than not, that’s Red Bull. Or should I say Max Verstappen.

Let us know in the comments what you think of Gary's Hungary insight and whether you'd like more from him on Patreon + which F1 topics you'd like him to get into.