There were mixed emotions in the Ferrari garage following the opening day of action at the Hungarian Grand Prix, with Charles Leclerc hailing a \u201cpretty positive\u201d start after taking P3 in both practice sessions while Lewis Hamilton admitted that Friday had \u201cnot been a good day\u201d on his side.<\/p>\n
Off the back of claiming a podium last time out in Belgium, Leclerc<\/a> looked to have carried that form to the Hungaroring, having been the closest challenger to the pace-setting McLaren<\/a> pair of Lando Norris<\/a> and Oscar Piastri<\/a> across free practice.<\/p>\n Reflecting on his day after jumping out of the car, Leclerc said of his third place result: \u201cFor now it looks like it\u2019s our position, and realistically I think it\u2019s going to be very tough to go and beat the McLarens tomorrow \u2013 they seem to be a step forward, but never say never.<\/p>\n \u201cThe feeling with the car has been pretty positive so far. We\u2019ve got to do some steps, more in the right direction for tomorrow, but for now the feeling is good.\u201d<\/p>\n Pushed on whether he feels that the Scuderia are ahead of Mercedes<\/a> and some of their other close competitors, Leclerc looked ahead to Saturday\u2019s Qualifying as he responded: \u201cFor now we are, but we can never rule them out.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s always very variable from Friday to Saturday, so I think we\u2019ll have to see tomorrow when we come to the track and see with the new conditions whether the pecking order is the same.<\/p>\n As for Hamilton<\/a>, the Briton placed in fifth and sixth respectively during each of the day\u2019s practice sessions.<\/p>\n However, when asked if he felt he had made positive progress throughout Friday, Hamilton answered: \u201cToday was not a good day for me, a big, big struggle with the balance of the car and a lot different to the previous years I\u2019ve been here.<\/p>\n \u201cWe tried two different things, we tried rectifying some of the balance problems we had in FP1<\/a>. We changed the car for FP2<\/a> and it\u2019s just inconsistent, very, very inconsistent balance from corner to corner, so you can\u2019t say it\u2019s just understeer, you can\u2019t just say it\u2019s oversteer.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s just far from being on rails and very out of balance. But I think it\u2019s probably something to do with maybe tyre temperatures or something, so we\u2019re going to try to figure that out for tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n In terms of whether he can hope for a second row in Saturday\u2019s Qualifying, Hamilton downplayed his chances.<\/p>\n \u201cI mean, Charles has been quick today \u2013 he\u2019s been generally happy with the car. For me I\u2019m quite far off, so I highly doubt it,\u201d the seven-time World Champion conceded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There were mixed emotions in the Ferrari garage following the opening day of action at the Hungarian Grand…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38887,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1687,372,6537,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-38886","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-f1","8":"tag-f1","9":"tag-formula-1","10":"tag-formula1","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38886\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}