Fernando Alonso in doubt for Hungarian Grand Prix as he misses practice with injury
Aston Martin said in a post on X that the two-time Formula 1 champion 'has been managing a muscular injury in his back' since last week's Belgian Grand Prix
He will be replaced by reserve driver Felipe Drugovich for the first session Friday and continue treatment before the team decides who will compete.
'A decision will then be made on Fernando's participation in (second practice) and the remainder of the weekend in due course,' Aston Martin said.
Brazilian driver Drugovich is in his fourth season as Aston Martin reserve but has yet to race in F1. He was the 2022 champion in Formula 2.
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Yahoo
18 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Ferrari boss confident 'frustrated' Hamilton will bounce back after Hungarian GP
Lewis Hamilton received support from his Ferrari team boss Fred Vasseur on Sunday just hours after the Briton cut a dejected figure following a lacklustre drive to 12th place in the Hungarian Grand Prix. While team-mate Charles Leclerc proved unable to convert Ferrari's first pole position of the season into victory due to unexplained mechanical problems during the race, seven-time champion Hamilton was battling to escape midfield and finished where he started. As on Saturday, when he was dumped out of Q2 and appeared miserable, claiming he was "completely useless" and saying the team should "bring in another driver", Hamilton seemed utterly deflated. To most observers, it appeared as if the pressures of living up to the hype of his spectacular marquee move from Mercedes, where he won six titles, and adjusting to the culture, car and expectations at Ferrari were overwhelming him. At 40, talk of imminent retirement circled around him. But Vasseur was swift to defend Hamilton, who has always been prone to impulsive heart-on-sleeve reactions. "I don't need to motivate him," said Vasseur. "Honestly, he's frustrated, but not demotivated. "He's demanding, but I think it's also why he's (a) seven-time world champion. I can perfectly understand this situation. "Sometimes, you are making comments on what the driver is saying (in) the car, but if you put the microphone on some other sportsmen, in football and so on, I'm not sure that it would be much better. "Sometimes, just after the race or just after qualifying, you are very disappointed and the first reaction is harsh. I can understand the frustration, but we are all frustrated." - 'He will be back' - Vasseur added Hamilton's weekend appeared worse than it really was because of the tight and competitive times that led him to miss out on reaching Q3 on Saturday. "For sure, when you are a seven-time world champion, your team-mate is on pole position and you are out in Q2, it's a tough situation," he said. "But overall, we can also have a deep look that he was in front of Charles in Q1 and with the first set that he was one-tenth off in Q2. We were not far away from having the two cars out in Q2. "I can understand the frustration from Lewis. That's normal and he will come back. He was stuck in a DRS train, but when he was alone, the pace was good. "I'm sure that he will be back and he will perform." Fourth-placed Leclerc backed his team-mate. "At the end, we are one team and as much as I want to finish in front of Lewis, I want both of us to be successful and for Ferrari to be successful, and obviously this weekend has been a tough one for Lewis," Leclerc said. "But I have no doubt that it's a one-off and I'm sure the second part of the season will be a lot more positive." Hamilton, sixth in the drivers' standings, but without a podium for Ferrari this year, said he was looking forward to a much-needed "break from work" during F1's August holiday before the Dutch Grand Prix on the final weekend of this month. str/iwd/nf
New York Times
21 minutes ago
- New York Times
Did McLaren favor Lando Norris over Oscar Piastri in Hungary? Why the team says no
The odds seemed to be stacked against Lando Norris on Sunday as Oscar Piastri hunted him down at the 2025 Hungarian Grand Prix, trying to overcome different McLaren strategies and a 12-second gap after his Australian teammate made a second pit stop. Norris opted for a Hail Mary one-stop strategy when race engineer Will Joseph floated the idea mid-race. As the final laps unfolded, he had older tires and was racing in dirty air as they caught up to traffic with no DRS assistance. Piastri was quickly closing the gap, getting it within eight-tenths of a second with five laps to go. Advertisement It was a close battle, and the McLaren teammates came close to contact when Piastri locked up as he made a dive at Turn 1 on the penultimate lap. He was right on Norris's tail and was told by his race engineer to 'remember how we go racing' just beforehand. But, in the end, the Briton brought home McLaren's 200th grand prix victory as he finished 0.698 seconds ahead. McLaren navigated the race wisely to secure a maximum result, extending its already giant constructors' championship lead. But from the drivers' championship perspective, the last race before Formula One's summer shutdown feels like a defining moment in their close battle. The gap between them sits at nine points, Piastri having the edge. Norris didn't look like he had a shot at winning by the end of the first lap of 70. He had a solid start, but so did pole sitter Charles Leclerc. As the grid barreled toward Turn 1, Piastri moved left, and Norris hoped he would go the other way instead. Norris caught a slipstream from his teammate before pulling to the right, while Piastri stayed in Leclerc's slipstream, gaining more speed, with the leading pair then moving right, squeezing off Norris's line. He then slid backwards, sitting fifth by the end of Lap 1. When asked about the start, Norris revealed he'd been sarcastic alone in the cockpit, uttering 'brilliant' to himself, crossing the line. 'I'd watched quite a few videos of lap one to Turn 1,' he continued. 'Clearly, it didn't work.' Norris had the pace, though, as he began another recovery drive. Joseph suggested line changes to help with specific corner time losses – most notably at Turn 2 – to gain more speed. It's these types of small details that build first a lap, then a stint. But being stuck in George Russell's turbulent air while chasing third, particularly on this short and twisty track, proved to be a challenge. Advertisement By Lap 22, Norris was in the lead. He'd not pitted while the other leaders were diving in for their first stops. With no chance to undercut Russell, he opted for more tire delta and extended his stint, eventually making the medium tires last for 31 laps. Later came the conversation about the one-stop Hail Mary. Joseph asked over the radio, 'Keen for it?' Norris replied, 'Yeah, why not?' Norris explained after the race that 'it wasn't a terrible thought that I can make the hards last until the end. I just knew I'd have to push flat out for basically every single lap. That's when it gets a little bit tricky. The tires get hot. It's easy to make mistakes. 'I knew I could make the tires get to the end quite easily, but it was (harder) to stay ahead of the others.' When the one-stopper was proposed, Norris led Leclerc by five seconds and Piastri by seven, as they lapped quicker on their fresher tires. Even if a two-stop strategy went perfectly from there, Norris knew his chances were slim to fight for a win without either a safety car or a strategy gamble. But that wasn't necessary. Norris emerged from his Lap 31 stop to take hard tires, facing a 19-second gap to the lead. When Leclerc pitted again nine laps later, he'd cut this to 14. With 25 laps to go, Norris moved back into the lead while Piastri took his second and final pit stop – Russell also having pitted out of his way. Then it was a case of managing his tires and navigating traffic until the end, even as Piastri roared back. 'My confidence wasn't the highest, but it was my best chance of trying to do something,' Norris said of the one-stopper. 'It turned out to be a little bit trickier, but it actually allowed me to fight until the very end for the win. 'Not sure it still felt like the best strategy, but I think with how difficult overtaking was, it turned out to be pretty good.' Advertisement Every team discusses the various strategy options pre-race, and going into the Budapest contest, the two-stop option was the optimal choice. McLaren discussed the one-stop option, Piastri said, so he knew 'it wasn't completely off the table.' But it didn't think a one-stop strategy would be possible. 'We convinced ourselves that the one-stop was starting to get in the game as we progressed with the first stint,' McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said. 'It wasn't like entering the race with a one or a two stop (both possible), and we would have picked the equivalent. We thought that the two-stop would be the dominant strategy.' What muddies the waters is that Norris was ahead of Piastri. The Australian driver emphasized that it's 'very difficult to know from the cockpit what is going to be the best thing to do.' The McLaren duo started on the back foot after Leclerc bested them surprisingly to snare pole. It's notoriously difficult to overtake at the Hungaroring, and pit stops are often required to execute a pass. McLaren tried to pit Piastri early on Lap 18 to get ahead of Leclerc at the first stint's end. 'It wasn't obvious that we just had enough pace to blow past him and go and win that way,' Piastri said of his strategy. 'For Lando, there was virtually nothing to lose by trying a one-stop race. For myself, potentially there was.' Piastri was asked to consider a one-stopper early in his second stint, but he committed to a two-stop race, his eyes set on catching his championship rival and teammate. His radio message when told the gap to Leclerc, before being called into the pits for a second stop, showed where Piastri's mindset was: the championship. In the end, Ferrari thwarted McLaren's second attempt at an undercut when Leclerc stopped again on Lap 40. Piastri then used tires that were five laps younger to blast past him with a bold move around Turn 1's outside. He set off in his Norris pursuit, but came up short. Advertisement 'I knew that I was catching him a lot when I had clean air, but as soon as I got close, it was incredibly tough to stay close enough,' Piastri explained. 'Even if I had more laps, I'm not sure the result would have been any different. But I certainly tried.' F1 has seen relationships turn sour when teammates battle – whether it's for a win or the championship. Tensions flare and boil over, and rash decisions are made. But McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown isn't worried about any fallout between Piastri and Norris 'because of the communication, trust and respect we all have and they have for each other.' 'We're very fortunate to have the two personalities that we have,' Brown said before Sunday's race. 'We love the challenge. We like it. We talk about it. It's not the elephant in the room. We meet every Sunday morning after we've seen how qualifying is going. They know each other's strategy. We're totally transparent.' Brown has spoken with both drivers individually about whether they've ticked each other off at times, when there are 'windows of opportunity.' The answer has been no from both. The competition is heating up, but it's not hostile. Brown said, 'We're not feeling any tension. As the championship builds, I'm sure that tension will grow,' and the team does expect them to clash again like they did in Montreal. 'I'm positive they're never going to run each other off the track, and that's where you get into bad blood. So they're free to race. There are rules around our racing, which is 'respect your teammate.' They know that,' Brown said, later adding, 'If something bubbles up, we'll deal with it.' Piastri's one attempt at passing Norris on Sunday is an example of what Stella described as 'firm' and 'fair' racing between them. Stella added, 'At the same time, it was definitely within our principles. We had a bit of a lock-up with Oscar. But at the same time, Lando left some space because he knew that Oscar would have been at the limit of braking.' But the move may have come too early for Piastri. He said after the race that he likely 'needed to be at least a couple of tenths closer (for the pass to come off), which was going to take a mistake from Lando to achieve that.' Norris ⚔️ Piastri: How did they not collide?! 😱#F1 #HungarianGP — Formula 1 (@F1) August 3, 2025 McLaren is on a dominant streak, with Norris and Piastri securing four consecutive 1-2 finishes to close out the first portion of the season. It has won 11 out of the 14 grands prix, with Norris taking five wins to Piastri's six. McLaren's gap to the rest of the grid is well over 200 points, and while the drivers are just nine points apart, third-place Max Verstappen is nearly 100 points behind Norris in the drivers' standings. Advertisement Questions of fairness will keep arising in a one-team title fight. And Norris and Piastri have diverged on race strategies in the two most recent races. There's always a risk that things could go wrong in such scenarios. 'We want to give our two drivers the possibility to utilize, express their talent, pursue their aspirations, their personal success, and business to happen within the boundaries of the team interest and the fairness, the sportsmanship, and the respect for one another,' Stella said. 'For me, this is what I see. When we have a deviating strategy, when we have different options, I think this is part of racing. 'We want to make sure that neither driver is surprised, and I think neither driver was surprised. So far, I can only be very grateful to the way Lando and Oscar have interpreted the way we go racing as a team, as a group, which includes the drivers, and I'm sure this is going to be the same until the end of the season.' Additional reporting by Luke Smith (Top photo of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri: Bradley Collyer/PA Images/Alamy Images/Sipa USA)
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
McLaren's surprising admission about Lando Norris' Hungarian GP strategy
It is a long-standing matter of humour in the Formula 1 paddock that the 'possible race strategies' infographic Pirelli circulates on Sunday mornings often bears no relationship at all to the way the race pans out. So it proved at the Hungaroring as Lando Norris ended up being effectively forced onto an u favourable one-stop strategy after a poor start, only for it to work in his favour. And he wasn't the only one – Max Verstappen could have finished fifth or six rather than ninth, reckoned Red Bull driver advisor Helmut Marko, if he had stopped once rather than twice. On Saturday the mood music from Pirelli was unequivocal about a two-stop being superior, despite the possibility of overnight rain effecting a reset on the new track surface. 'At the moment a one-stop is more or less 10 seconds slower,' said Pirelli motorsport manager Mario Isola on Saturday evening. 'With the level of degradation that we measured yesterday [Friday]. So if it is cooler and you are able to manage better the tyre, these 10 seconds could be less. That's why I believe that two-stop is still the preferred choice.' Conditions were indeed cooler although the shape of the race was dictated by the events on the opening lap, when Norris – from third on the grid – moved over to the inside on the approach to Turn 1 with a view to passing team-mate Oscar Piastri, who had qualified second to Ferrari's Charles Leclerc. The move wasn't on and, in backing out, Norris lost track position to George Russell and then to Fernando Alonso. While he quickly passed Alonso back for fourth place, Norris was then unable to escape the 'dirty air' of Russell's Mercedes. As Alonso fell back from this battle, bottling up the cars behind, the window for a one-stop race begin to creak open. Charles Leclerc, Ferrari leads at the start Indeed, this quickly became Norris's only option, while McLaren's strategy for Piastri was dictated by the need to get past Leclerc somehow. 'Our baseline strategy today was a two-stop strategy,' said McLaren team principal Andrea Stella in his post-race briefing. 'We didn't think necessarily that the one-stop was possible. So with Oscar we tried to go on a good, deterministic, two-stop strategy, trying to pass Leclerc in the first stop, then we tried to extend in the second stop to have a tyre delta in order to have those few tenths of a second to be able to pass Leclerc, and this did work.' But it is between these two Piastri pit visits that the momentum swung towards a one-stop. When he stopped for his first set of hard-compound Pirellis at the end of lap 18 he forced Ferrari to respond, but Leclerc emerged ahead and they both filtered out of the pits behind Alonso – who had begun to pick up his pace three laps earlier, moving into the gap McLaren and Ferrari thought they had. Although both Leclerc and Piastri got by Alonso as the lap count entered the 20s, it became increasingly clear the Aston Martin driver was aiming to extend his first stint and that this would be problematic for Russell and Norris, should they pit. Russell proved this by taking four laps to pass the two-time F1 world champion. By this point doing anything other than a one-stop was looking unfavourable for Norris, and Piastri was already alert to the possibility that his strategy was sub-optimal. While his earlier responses to race engineer Tom Stallard asking about stopping once were in the negative, he began to pitch questions about whether it would be possible to stay out for the remainder of the race. The tone suggested that in trying to undercut Leclerc, he had given Norris an opening to pass them both. So even as they homed in on Norris before he stopped at the end of lap 31, the die was cast. Lando Norris, McLaren 'When it comes to Lando and the one-stop strategy, when we extended, leaving Lando out, we didn't think that the one-stop would have been possible still,' Stella revealed. 'But credit to Lando, he managed to put together some very strong sectors and lap times with tyres that were relatively used. So we somehow convinced ourselves that the one-stop was starting to get in the game as we progressed with the first stint. 'It wasn't like entering the race with a one- or a two-stop and we would have picked them being equivalent. We thought that the two-stop would be the dominant strategy today.' Read Also: F1 Hungarian GP: Lando Norris wins over Oscar Piastri as Charles Leclerc collapses Norris set several fastest laps in his early phase on the hards and it was at this point that the tenor of the conversations between Stallard and Piastri changed: the Australian driver was given a choice between 'undercut on Leclerc or tyre delta to Lando'. McLaren then attempted some subterfuge, telling Piastri to 'box this lap' and deploying its mechanics onto the pit apron on lap 39. Ferrari responded by pre-emptively bringing in Leclerc to block the undercut – but instead Piastri extended his stint for another six laps. Norris had some assistance when Russell pitted out of his way at the end of lap 42, by which point he was 9.5s off Piastri and inherited the lead when his team-mate pitted. Crucially, Piastri had lost ground hand over fist while extending – on lap 44 alone he lost 2s relative to Norris. Piastri then had to use the best of his tyre delta to pass Leclerc on the road. Lando Norris, McLaren, Oscar Piastri, McLaren Naturally, given how the race transpired, Stella was asked if the team had consciously favoured Norris over Piastri, but he decisively ruled this out. 'We wanted to give Oscar enough of a tyre delta to pass Leclerc, but also to have a fair chance on Lando, because that would have meant being on an optimal two-stop,' he said. 'So we wanted to make sure that, thinking about Leclerc, we were not deviating too much from an optimal two-stop, because that would have been unfair to Oscar in relation to his competition with Lando. And we also checked with Oscar what his preference was, and certainly he wanted to have an opportunity to win the race. 'And we thought that with enough tyre delta to Leclerc, Oscar would have had a chance in the end.' Read Also: Lewis Hamilton's cryptic response to his 'Ferrari needs to change driver' comments Red Bull reveals cause of Hungarian GP meltdown Charles Leclerc explains how 'undriveable' Ferrari cost him Hungary F1 win To read more articles visit our website.
