Hungarian GP 2023
JULY 22, 2023
Practice 3 Report - Hamilton heads P3
© Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd.
By Luis Vasconcelos
Lewis Hamilton set the fastest time in the final practice session for the Hungarian Grand Prix, beating both Red Bull drivers by an impressive margin of a quarter of a second. In a very busy session, as teams and drivers try to find the best strategy to cope with the new mandatory tyre allocation for qualifying, all three compounds were seen in action and not all drivers used the Soft compound, with the final times sheet finally starting to look a lot more normal than it was the case on Friday.
On a track where he has won eight times, Lewis Hamilton set a very impressive lap time on the soft compound, later in the session, when the track had already gathered more grip, as rubber had been washed away by a couple of heavy showers since the end of FP2. Still, his performance can be compared to the Red Bull drivers’, as they were on track just a couple of minutes earlier and with Verstappen complaining of lack of grip and a highly unstable rear end on the RB19, the Dutch was unable to match his old rival’s pace and even saw team mate Pérez get within 0.006s of his best time, the Mexican being one of the few drivers to improve on a second quick lap with the soft tyres. Russell also managed the same feat, but the man who started last year’s Hungarian Grand Prix from pole position was down in P6 and more than 0.3s slower than his team mate.
For Ferrari the session was not particularly encouraging. After devoting the first 50 minutes of running to race simulations, Leclerc and Sainz finally ran their qualifying simulations on the soft tyre, but they were down in 7th and 8th place, respectively, on times comparable to Russell’s but not in Hamilton’s league, so the Scuderia has work to do to improve the SF-23’s before qualifying.
Aston Martin followed the same pattern as Ferrari, Alonso struggling to get inside the top ten but managing P9 at the end of the session, with Stroll two places behind. Their lap times, though, were done a bit earlier in the session, so there may be a bit more performance on the AMR23 than this session’s results suggest.
Nico Hulkenberg managed another stunning lap, putting his Haas VF-23 in fourth place and just 0.016s behind Verstappen, while team mate Kevin Magnussen continued to struggle and was down in P15 having run a tyre program identical to the German’s.
Although he was only 5th quickest, Lando Norris’ speed in FP3 caught everyone’s attention, as the McLaren driver set his best time on the Medium compound tyre and was just 0.271s slower than Hamilton, when there’s around 0.4s performance difference between the two tyre compounds. Piastri made a mistake on his first lap with the medium tyres and was only 14th fastest, but then was able to match his team mate’s times when they did longer runs towards the end of the session.
Alfa Romeo continues to look like a potential candidate to get at least one car into Q3, Bottas ending the session in 10th place but with a best lap time set in the first 20 minutes of the session, when grip was still quite low. The Finn and his team mate Zhou Guanyu were the only drivers to run with all three compounds in this session and even on the Hard compound Bottas was very quick, so they should be OK in Q1.
Things didn’t look so good for Alpine and AlphaTauri this morning, but the French team worked more on race preparations than for qualifying. On the Italian team, though, there seemed to be a loss of pace compared to Friday, with Ricciardo being 18th quickest and Yuki Tsunoda ending the session in last place. But given his gap to Hamilton was just 1.2s, it’s clear the whole field is very closely packed and any minor gain of performance will have a big impact on everyone’s grid position.