The Hungarian GP had a thrilling conclusion as Oscar Piastri failed to dislodge leader and McLaren team mate Lando Norris, but it could have been even more intriguing had Charles Leclerc still been in contention.
We’ll never know if one or both McLaren drivers would have passed him without a fight had he not been slowed by a still mysterious issue in the last stint of the race that ultimately saw him drop to fourth, behind George Russell.
The Ferrari driver’s frustration was clear on the radio as he appeared to blame the team for the car becoming undriveable, apparently because of what he thought was an “aggressive” wing adjustment at the stop that he didn’t request.
Between getting out of the car and meeting the media he learned that wasn’t the case, and that an unidentified issue had been the cause.
As we know F1 cars can be incredibly sensitive to aero damage – in Hungary Oliver Bearman was forced to stop after he experienced similar symptoms to Leclerc, and afterwards the Haas driver had no explanation as to how any such damage had occurred.
After retrieving Leclerc’s from parc ferme the Ferrari crew found nothing visibly obvious in terms of aero damage that could have been responsible, and still had no answers as of Monday morning.
By chance Ferrari is doing 2026 Pirelli testing in Hungary this week. The team has the option to run the Leclerc chassis and potentially find out if there is a problem with it (or the Hamilton chassis or the spare with race-used LEC parts), although no decision had been made on its plans at the time of writing.
In the immediate aftermath of the race Leclerc was keen to retract some of the radio chatter that hinted at an operational or set-up mistake.
“First of all, I need to take back the words I’ve said in the radio,” he said when I asked him about the radio traffic.
“Because I thought that it was coming from one thing. But then I got a lot more details since I got out the car, and it was actually an issue coming from the chassis, and nothing that we could have done differently.
“I started to feel the issue in lap 40, or something like that. And then it got worse, laps after laps after laps. And towards the end, we were two seconds off the pace, and the car was just undrivable.
“Again, as I repeat myself, but this was an issue, and it’s an outlier. It shouldn’t ever happen again. But, I mean, I’m still very disappointed. We had one opportunity this year to win a race, which I think was this weekend.
“The first stint was perfect. The first laps of the second stint were really good as well. And I think we were in pace to try and win that race. The last stint was a disaster, when I started to have that issue on the chassis.”
When I asked if a kerb or gravel could have triggered something he said: “I don’t know yet how it was caused, but we will look into it.”
He added: “I think it was quite tricky. Otherwise I probably will have known, and they will have told me. Apparently it wasn’t as obvious on data. However, now we can definitely confirm that that there was a problem.”
Leclerc confirmed that he thought a front wing adjustment at the stop was responsible for the change in the behaviour of the car, which was so bad that he knew straight away that victory was likely to slip away.
“When I started to feel the issues, I didn’t really know where that came from. I thought it was from a change we did on the front wing at the pit stop being too aggressive.
“But then, of course, it got a lot worse, and then it seemed a bit off to me, but when I first felt the very strange behaviour of the car, I was okay, if this is staying, it’s going to slip away from us.
“It wasn’t very consistent, but yeah, basically every corner, it was doing something different.”
After the race team boss Fred Vasseur had no theories about what had gone wrong.
“Honestly, the situation was quite strange,” said the Frenchman. “We were under control the first 40 laps of the race, we are very in control the first stint, a bit more difficult the second one, but it was still manageable. And last stint, was a disaster, very difficult to drive, the balance was not there.
“And honestly, we don’t know exactly what’s happened so far. It means that we have to investigate something broken on the chassis side, or whatever. But it was at one stage I thought that we will never finish the race, we can be lucky in this situation to score points of a P4.
“It’s really frustrating for us, because that I think we did the first pole position of the season. The first two stints went pretty well, and we lost completely the pace and the path of the weekend.
He continued: “The first lap of the last stint, he lost something like one second at one stage and perhaps the message that also you interpret.
“He asked us if we didn’t do a mistake on the front wing, and adjust the front wing, but [we didn’t]. And we lost completely the pace, and then perhaps a bit snowball effect, but at the end of the day that I think from 38 to 43 we lost at least eight-tenths.”
For Leclerc it turned into one of those nightmare days, and in the course of his defence against George Russell he picked up a 5-second penalty for erratic driving.
It didn’t make any difference to his safe P4, but the penalty point was probably annoying.
“I knew I was on the limit,” he conceded. “I don’t have much opinion about it. I felt like I moved before braking and then I braked, obviously angling my car towards the apex, which is normally what I do, but I can imagine George being quite vocal on the radio. It’s normally the case.
“I don’t mind, especially on a race like this. If there was a safety car at the end of the race and I would have taken a five second penalty, I probably would have been a lot more frustrated. But it wasn’t the case.”
For Leclerc the real frustration was that this was the first opportunity in 2026 for Ferrari to win a full-length race, and while there are some tracks coming in the second half of the year that historically have been good for the Maranello outift, McLaren is going to be hard to beat everywhere.
“I think they are the strongest team out there,” he said. “And even today, they were very, very fast. I think on a track like this, what gave me hope of winning is that we were starting first, and with the dirty air, it’s a struggle to get past. I think Oscar had probably a bit more place than me, but couldn’t overtake.
“So I don’t think we are going into the second half of the season thinking that we can win anywhere.
“And that’s what makes the frustration even bigger, because we knew that this was one opportunity, probably over the season, and we had to take it. But unfortunately, with this issue, we couldn’t do much.”
Adam Cooper F1 