Hungarian Grand Prix

Race Notes

Sergey Sirotkin finished 16th and Lance Stroll 17th in the Hungarian Grand Prix

Sergey started the race from P19 on the soft Pirelli tyre

Lance was forced to start the race from the pitlane, after changing his front wing during parc fermé following his accident in Saturday’s qualifying session

Both cars made clean starts and gained positions on the opening lap

Sergey pitted on lap 31 for the medium tyre whilst Lance pitted on lap 47 for the ultrasoft tyre

Paddy Lowe, Chief Technical Officer: It was a very long, hot afternoon in Budapest with all our attention unfortunately on the blunt end of the race, rather than the sharp end. We ran a split strategy across the two cars with Sergey starting on the option and Lance on the prime, hoping to take advantage of incidents as they may arise with two one-stop strategies. Unfortunately, Lance had to start from the pitlane because we had no spares of the front wing specification he’d been using in qualifying. Sergey gained some positions at the start on the two Saubers, although one of them Leclerc retired very early. The rest of our afternoon was a fight between our two drivers and the other Sauber of Ericsson, who took an early pitstop at the first VSC, which gave him an extremely long stint. We hoped it wouldn’t work for Ericsson but unfortunately it did, so that meant we finished the race in 16th and 17th. Ultimately our pace was only good enough to compete with each other today, but the team did a good job, executed good pitstops and it was a well-controlled race, so we know our pace is where we need to focus. We’re ready for a rest after this first half of the season and next week’s test, so we’ll come back refreshed and ready for the next push in Belgium.

Sergey Sirotkin: I think we can say we have finished the first half of the year on a high. Obviously, it’s not that visible in the results but, being realistic from where we started, the strategy we had and dealing with blue flags we can be happy with how we performed. There’s still some room for improvement, which we will analyse and correct throughout the summer break, but we can take quite a lot of positives from this race and all of us can take a deserved rest.

Lance Stroll: Yesterday it was nice to get into Q2, but obviously Q2 didn't go the way we wanted it to and today, we had to start from the pitlane. We put the old front wing on, which we haven't had for a couple of races now. I definitely felt the loss in performance, and the car felt like it wasn't cooperating as well as it has been since we got the new front wing. We went on a different strategy to Sergey and tried to pick up the pace at the end of the race with the qualifying tyres, but there just weren't enough laps left. It was one of those races.