McLaren’s strong run of improvements continued at the Hungaroring where for the fifth time in the last six races they made the biggest year-on-year improvement of any team.

Approaching the summer break, McLaren are the most-improved team of the year so far, averaging 1.3 seconds faster per lap at every track so far this year. Alfa Romeo and Toro Rosso are the only other teams to have gained more than a second on average.

The only team whose lap times have not improved on average compared to last year are Williams, who are a tenth of a second slower. However they have shown improvement since the start of the season, and today’s qualifying session gave the best evidence of that so far as George Russell claimed 16th on the grid on-merit.

That may be little to cheer about, but is a step in the right direction for the team. It’s the first time all year they haven’t been the slowest team in qualifying: Russell out-qualified both Racing Points.

For the third race in a row, Ferrari posted the smallest year-on-year lap time improvement of any team.

Rain fell during qualifying last year which meant we didn’t get to see the very best from the 2018 cars at the Hungaroring. The quickest lap time was set during final practice.

That’s partly why this year has seen the second-largest year-on-year improvement in the best lap time at the track. Max Verstappen lowered the track record by over one-and-a-half seconds to 1’14.572.

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The current configuration of the Hungaroring was first used in 2003. The cars are over seven seconds per lap faster now than they were then.

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2019 Hungarian Grand Prix