Tech Preview | What Red Bull are hoping to achieve with large upgrades

The Hungaroring: the 'Monaco without walls'

The Hungarian Circuit is often described as the “Monaco without walls,” referring to its very slow-speed nature. This track features a series of medium-speed corners through the middle sector and a slow third sector, which is very harmful to the rear tyres, especially in qualifying. As a consequence, all teams usually adopt the maximum downforce set-up around here, which gives them an advantage in looking after the tyres during the race on Sunday. 

Due to the very low abrasiveness nature of the tarmac, Pirelli has brought the three softest compounds of their set, the C3, the C4 and the C5. While the mediums and the hards are intended to be used during Sunday’s race, the softs are intended to be used only in qualifying.  

As often happens around this circuit, the temperature will also play a key role: the very hot climate expected between Friday and Sunday will make tyre management even more complicated, both during qualifying and the race.  As also happened last year, many teams may decide to shift their balance slightly more towards the rear end, mainly to preserve the tyres during the race, which could result in a possible struggle in qualifying. 

However, since the Hungaroring only features two short straights, the qualifying position usually plays a very important role in the final result. All these factors will make finding the right compromise and set-up a huge challenge also for the engineers this weekend. 

Red Bull, McLaren and Mercedes all with upgrades 

Red Bull, Mercedes and McLaren have all decided to bring upgrades this weekend, which will be crucial to define the hierarchies among the top teams in the next races. 

Although changes were not visible on cars yet, Verstappen was very clear about the new parts that'll fit on his RB20 this weekend: “We brought stuff (to Silverstone) but they were not particularly big I would say. This is bigger than we have brought already so for everybody this is an important weekend. [...] If this is not giving us some good lap time, then I don't know of course how the rest of the season is going to evolve.” 

His words underline what we’ve seen in the last races: even though Red Bull brought some new parts both in Barcelona and at Silverstone, the RB20 was still very difficult to tune during the weekend, with a lot of tests made during free practices to come up with a good set-up. 

For this reason, the new package will aim at extracting even more performance from the RB20 while making it more versatile, to better adapt to set-up changes and to different layouts. The new parts will be tested only on Verstappen’s car this weekend, while Perez will use them from Spa onwards. 

Coming to Mereceds after their maiden victories in the last two races, the Brackley team will try to replicate their performance this weekend too. 

The slow corners and traction zones, together with the very hot weather, may not favour the W15, which is better suited to faster corners and lower temperatures, but the upgrades may help the team in opening the car’s working window and adapting it also to less-favourable circuits. 

Having a look at McLaren’s situation right now, the Woking team had the best car in the last four/five races, and this is a good advantage for them for the rest of the season. 

The Hungaroring may not be the MCL38’s best track: as explained for Mercedes, the very high temperatures, together with the C5 may not favor McLaren especially during qualifying. The high deg and the harder compounds may however brighten up the MCL38’s strengths during the race.

Moreover, this weekend’s upgrades could help McLaren gain even more on their competitors, giving the team the chance to create a sort of “performance bearing” that would prevent the engineers and drivers from making the mistakes seen in the last few rounds. 

As Oscar Piastri underlined in the usual Thursday press conference, McLaren has just come back to the top after many years, and they still need a bit of time to resume the automatisms and train the team to fight for important positions. 

Ferrari: will the new floor solve the porpoising issue? 

Last but not least, Ferrari will need to find some answers to the recent performance loss this weekend: after testing both the new and old package in Silverstone, the team is expected to bring a new floor that should solve the recent bouncing issues. 

If so, they’ll be able to use the Barcelona-spec package, which improved the SF-24’s behaviour in medium and slow-speed corners while also improving its stability at high speed. 

The team is confident that this change will improve the car's overall performance and bring Ferrari back into competition with the other top teams, but only the track will give us a clearer idea of whether the new floor will improve or not. 

In conclusion, everything is set for another exciting weekend of racing, with four teams that could all fight for the win on a circuit where overtaking is always very difficult. Only the track will give us a clearer idea of how the updates will work for the top teams, but we can only deep dive into free practices to have a better view.