The Budapest Balance Sheet: Who Banked a Strong Friday — and Who Went Bust at the Hungaroring

Two sessions, two different Ferrari leaders, one red flag, four stand-in drivers and a perfect pole record suddenly on life support. After a breathless opening day in Budapest, we separate the teams leaving the circuit with a spring in their step from those already counting the hours until the summer break.

Friday at the Hungaroring began with Charles Leclerc fastest and ended with Lewis Hamilton fastest, and in between it managed to squeeze in a broken Aston Martin, a crashed Alpine, a black-and-white flag, four rookie stand-ins and enough radio rage to fill a highlights reel. Ferrari’s sweep of both sessions has turned the weekend on its head: Mercedes, winners of every pole position this season, suddenly look mortal on a track that was always supposed to suit their rivals. But the timesheet only ever tells half the story on a Friday. Here is our verdict on who truly won — and lost — the opening day of the Hungarian Grand Prix.

Ferrari On the rise

The pre-weekend logic said the Hungaroring’s tight, twisty layout would flatter the SF-26’s class-leading chassis while hiding its straight-line deficit. Friday said: correct, and then some. Leclerc needed a single soft-tyre lap to go half a second clear of the field in the morning; Hamilton’s 1:18.729 headed a comfortable one-two in the afternoon; and the race runs looked just as serene. An aggressive new rear wing, inspired by the trailing-edge flaps on the Mercedes, appears to have landed exactly as intended.

It wasn’t flawless — Leclerc’s morning ended early at the weighbridge with a suspected gearbox problem — and Fred Vasseur spent the build-up insisting that an on-paper advantage is “no guarantee,” with Ferrari privately on high alert over tyre management in Sunday’s forecast 32°C (90°F) heat and 50°C (122°F) track temperatures. But after a clean sweep of day one, the Scuderia has earned something no one has managed all season: favourite status over Mercedes on a Saturday.

McLaren On the rise

Friday morning was a write-off by design: Lando Norris spent it on aero evaluation with flow-vis paint smeared across his floor, aborted his first soft run with a trip across the Turn 11 run-off, and wound up 11th, nearly two seconds adrift. Then the real McLaren stood up. Norris jumped to third in the afternoon, half a second off Hamilton, and was two-tenths up on his best lap when Franco Colapinto’s crash brought out the red flag. The major upgrade package the team brought to Budapest is clearly working.

Oscar Piastri’s eighth place deserves an asterisk of context rather than concern — he surrendered his morning to development driver Leonardo Fornaroli and was still dialled out of the car by evening. With both papaya cars inside the top eight and the development race tilting their way, McLaren’s quiet Friday was arguably more impressive than Ferrari’s loud one.

Racing Bulls On the rise

Two cars in the top ten in the morning — Arvid Lindblad ninth, Liam Lawson tenth — and two cars in the top ten again in the afternoon, with Lawson climbing to seventh. On a day when their direct rivals for sixth in the constructors’ championship were busy crashing (more on them shortly), Racing Bulls banked the kind of low-drama, high-mileage Friday that midfield seasons are built on. The momentum, heading into the break, is theirs to lose.

Audi On the rise

Gabriel Bortoleto’s sixth place in the morning turned heads; Nico Hülkenberg’s ninth in the afternoon confirmed it wasn’t a mirage. Both Audi drivers finished inside the top 11 in both sessions, the car looked planted through the Hungaroring’s relentless direction changes, and the garage radiated the quiet satisfaction of a team whose 2026 project is maturing ahead of schedule. No drama, no excuses, steady points-paying pace.

Aston Martin On the slide

This was supposed to be the weekend everything changed. Instead, the AMR26B’s grand unveiling produced a red flag, a suspected rear-left suspension failure — on a component that is part of the new package — as Lance Stroll put the power down exiting Turn 2 in the morning, and a complete no-show in the afternoon, with the team light on spares and parts being flown in to salvage Saturday. Adrian Newey’s stated target of “comfortably” reaching Q2 already feels a world away.

The sting in the tail is that Fernando Alonso’s day wasn’t actually bad: 13th in the morning, 2.475 seconds off — a margin that, if repeated in qualifying, would be comfortably the team’s most competitive single lap of a wretched season. But silver linings don’t fix suspensions, and the stakes could hardly be higher: this upgrade was meant to convince Alonso, out of contract at the end of the year, that the project deserves his signature. One car breaking on its first proper run was not the pitch.

Mercedes On the slide

Make no mistake: this verdict is relative, and by any normal standard a P5 and P13 would be a shrug. But Mercedes don’t trade in normal standards — they trade in pole positions, ten from ten so far this season, and that streak has never looked closer to dying. George Russell, who had hoped the team’s power issues were resolved for this circuit, radioed that his car felt “horrible” and unbalanced on his way to fifth, nearly a second off Hamilton. He has called 2026 his toughest psychological battle; days like this are why.

Kimi Antonelli’s 13th came with mitigation — a soft-tyre run aborted to the red flag, a programme aimed squarely at Sunday, and two lurid near-spins survived rather than suffered — but the championship leader has never finished a Friday this far from the front in 2026. The silver lining: Mercedes’ race pace data looked sturdy, and this track has a habit of reshuffling the order when the fuel comes out. The concern: so does their qualifying record when it matters most.

Alpine On the slide

Franco Colapinto’s Friday reads like a horror story in two acts. Act one: he sits out the morning entirely, his seat loaned to Paul Aron. Act two: eleven laps into his only session of the day, he loses the rear through the final corner and backs his car into the barriers, bringing out the red flag and ending his afternoon. He will start Saturday — at one of the calendar’s most punishing tracks for the underprepared — having completed less running than anyone in the field.

Pierre Gasly, 14th, at least kept his car intact, though his radio message about something feeling “extremely bad… like it’s broken in Turn 12” hardly inspires confidence. With Racing Bulls flawless on the same day, Alpine’s grip on sixth in the championship is loosening by the hour.

Williams On the slide

Carlos Sainz’s morning was a masterclass in how to ruin a session: a first fast lap blocked, a second destroyed by a huge tyre-shredding lock-up at Turn 1, an erratic-driving referral for the Verstappen incident — caused, he explained, by an unplugged radio that left him deaf to his engineer’s warnings — and then a black-and-white flag for unsportsmanlike conduct after remonstrating with Aron when the Alpine stand-in got in his way. Last on the timesheet was the inevitable result. Alex Albon, meanwhile, spent both sessions bouncing through the second-sector chicane on his way to 15th and 16th. Seventeenth and 16th in the afternoon: Williams simply never got started.

And Max Verstappen? The day’s great escape artist — fourth on merit, cleared by the stewards over the morning’s erratic-driving allegation, and close enough to Ferrari in both sessions to keep Red Bull’s weekend alive. Neither winner nor loser: call him the leading man in waiting.

What’s next

Final practice runs on Saturday at 12:30 local before qualifying at 16:00 — the session where Mercedes’ perfect pole record meets its sternest examination — and Sunday’s Grand Prix starts at 15:00. Here is the schedule across the globe (session start times; Budapest shares a time zone with Paris):

Friday’s ledger, then: Ferrari rich and getting richer, McLaren quietly compounding, two midfield teams banking interest — and four garages staring at overdrafts they’ll need the summer break to repay. The stopwatch resumes its audit at 12:30.