Racing
© Jonathan Borba
The FIA ordered overnight remedial work at the Hungaroring after Friday practice revealed that the track surface was breaking up on the racing line at Turn 1, the circuit’s main overtaking point.
Ahead of FP3 and qualifying, the FIA said in a statement: “It was inspected and remedial works were undertaken overnight.” It added that “Two areas were addressed, one online and one to the right of the line where an overtaking car would travel.”
That intervention came after a day in which the condition of the track became the dominant story. The problems had started before Formula 1 arrived, with Pirelli chief engineer Simone Berra saying the circuit informed teams a few weeks before the event that the asphalt had begun breaking up after other championships had run there. Pirelli also found grip levels lower than expected in its Wednesday measurements, and lower than last year.
Drivers said the issue was not only the bumps but the unpredictability of the patched sections. George Russell, the Mercedes driver, described it as “quite a strange day out there I think for everybody,” and said: “Budapest is an amazing track to drive but they've resurfaced half of the track, super bumpy, a lot of it's breaking up around the last couple of corners, which is making it quite strange to drive on.”
Oscar Piastri, the McLaren driver, said the new sections were “not very grippy” and “very worn,” which made the circuit “a very challenging circuit at the moment.” For drivers who had missed FP1 because of rookie-session substitutions, that changing surface made the learning curve even steeper.
The deterioration was visible through the day. The ideal line darkened noticeably, dirt and marbles built up off-line, and the most serious damage was concentrated at Turns 1, 12 and 13. At the final corner, drivers were already changing their line to avoid the worst of the damaged patches instead of clipping the usual apex.
Berra said Turn 14 was also becoming increasingly rough and warned the situation “can get worse lap by lap,” especially in the race with all 20 cars circulating together and hotter conditions expected over the rest of the weekend.
The surface changes affected the running directly. Friday’s sessions were filled with lock-ups, missed braking points and cars running wide, with the instability increasingly looking like a track issue rather than simple driver error. The clearest example came when Franco Colapinto crashed at Turn 12, one of the resurfaced areas that proved unexpectedly slippery.
With Turn 1 too important to leave unresolved before qualifying, the FIA’s overnight patching became the key development from Friday and set up Saturday with the state of the surface, rather than any pure pace reading, still likely to shape the competitive picture.