Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc took a sensational, surprise pole position at the Hungarian Grand Prix ahead of McLaren’s title contenders Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris.<\/b><\/p>\n
Leclerc, nowhere near the McLaren’s pace until the final part of qualifying, pipped Piastri by just 0.026 seconds.<\/p>\n
Norris, 16 points adrift in the championship, was 0.015secs behind his team-mate.<\/p>\n
Mercedes’ George Russell was fourth, ahead of a superb performance from the two Aston Martins, with Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll locking out the third row.<\/p>\n
Leclerc’s team-mate Lewis Hamilton failed to progress beyond the second knock-out session and will start 12th.<\/p>\n
Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, struggling all weekend, was eighth, behind Sauber’s Gabriel Bortoleto.<\/p>\n
Told he was on pole position by his engineer Bryan Bozzi, Leclerc was incredulous. “What?” he replied. “Mamma mia.”<\/p>\n
Once out of the car, he said: “I have no words, it is probably one of the best pole positions I’ve ever had because I did not expect that.<\/p>\n
“Today I don’t understand anything in F1. The whole qualifying has been extremely difficult. And when I say that, it is not an exaggeration.<\/p>\n
“It was difficult for us to get to Q2 and it was difficult to get to Q3. In Q3, the conditions changed a little bit, everything became a lot trickier and I knew I had to just do a clean lap to target third and it ended up pole position, I definitely cannot believe that.”<\/p>\n
Piastri said: “The wind did a 180 from Q2 to Q3, which changed the circuit. Difficult to judge in those conditions. I was a bit surprised we couldn’t go quicker than that.<\/p>\n
“Charles has been quick all weekend, and this morning (in final practice) he was closer than we expected. I wasn’t expecting to be second to a Ferrari this weekend but he’s done a good job.”<\/p>\n
Norris added: “Charles did a good job on that last lap, probably risked a bit more in the conditions, the wind changed a lot and punished us. We thought we did a good job on the laps but we were just slow.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc took a sensational, surprise pole position at the Hungarian Grand Prix ahead of McLaren’s title…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":321583,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4103],"tags":[4199,707,4200,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-321582","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-f1","8":"tag-f1","9":"tag-formula-1","10":"tag-formula1","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114979917295288981","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=321582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321582\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/321583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=321582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=321582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=321582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}