Charles Leclerc left the 2026 F1 Hungarian GP frustrated after finishing in P4 on Sunday.
The Hungarian round delivered yet another confusing result for Ferrari, and Leclerc did not hide his disappointment afterward. Instead, he pointed to a pattern that has followed the team through the last three races.
Following a grid penalty for Lewis Hamilton, the driver from Monaco started on the front row. However, a horrible first couple of corners saw him lose out to his teammate, Max Verstappen and Oscar Piastri. From there he had a relatively quiet race, lacking a small bit of pace to fight the top 5.
However, a retirement for the Australian and the time penalty for his Ferrari teammate meant the 28-year-old secured P4 behind Kimi Antonelli.
Leclerc on the 2026 F1 Hungarian GP: A pattern that doesn’t add up
“No, definitely not,” Leclerc said when it was put to him about how he cannot feel happy about the race. “I mean, it’s a disappointing weekend and I think the thing that is standing out for me after the last three races is that out of the last three races, there were two races where we were expecting to struggle, and we finished first and second. And in the race where we expected to do well, we finished fourth and fifth.”
Those two bright spots were easy to identify. One was Charles Leclerc’s win at the British Grand Prix, where he crossed the line first after a race weekend Ferrari had not expected to dominate. The other was his runner-up finish at the Belgian Grand Prix, where Kimi Antonelli overtook him in the closing stages. On weekends at power circuits, Ferrari overperformed compared to expectations.
The turnaround had been building for a while: a few round earlier. Lewis Hamilton delivered his own high point, taking his first Grand Prix victory for Ferrari after winning the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix. It was a statement drive that ended Mercedes’ run of dominance and gave F1 its first non-Mercedes win of the season.
That result briefly flipped the momentum in Ferrari’s favour, until Austria dragged both drivers back down to earth. Both results arrived under lowered expectations, which only sharpened the contrast with Leclerc’s below-par F1 Hungarian GP finish.
That kind of unpredictability rarely comes down to one factor. Leclerc made clear it isn’t about one driver outperforming the other.
Ferrari inconsistent at 2026 F1 Hungarian GP: Charles Leclerc
Instead, he insisted both cars had struggles in Budapest. Going into the weekend, through Friday, and even most of Saturday, Ferrari looked favourites for pole and the race. However, they fell short in both Q3 and the Grand Prix itself. With the Scuderia having the best chassis in F1 at present, P4 and P5 was hugely disappointing.
“Both cars seem to have that tendency of being good in the weekend where we expected to struggle and struggling in the weekend where we thought we would be good,” he added. “So this is to be understood.”
However, he acknowledged that a clean start could have changed everything, since overtaking proved difficult all afternoon on this track.
The soft tyre call at the start
Behind Leclerc’s frustration at the 2026 F1 Hungarian GP sat a tricky qualifying session that left him short on fresh rubber. This was an all-too-familiar problem in F1 when a lap goes wrong on Saturday as he had to burn through a second set of new softs in Q2. As a result, Ferrari turned to a used soft-tyre strategy at the start.
“I just wanted to go on the soft at the beginning,” Leclerc explained. “Unfortunately for me, yesterday with the tricky qualifying, I used [the] new medium and all new soft. So I only had scrub tyres and for the start, I wanted to get the advantage of the soft.”
The F1 Hungarian GP start for Leclerc was always going to be a gamble. That early tyre call still holds up in hindsight as Verstappen, Lawson, Hülkenberg, Bortoleto and Alonso all did very long stints on softs.
“The softs for us, we thought, was a good tyre. And I kind of think that the race shows that we were on the right side of things,” he said.
“Everybody tends to go on the soft later on, and I don’t think the medium was that good today.”
Therefore, the tyre read wasn’t the problem according to Leclerc; execution elsewhere was.
Consistency remains the real fix
When asked how much of Ferrari’s struggle came down to raw pace versus execution, Leclerc pointed to a bigger issue after the F1 Hungarian GP: consistency across tyres and stints.
“We weren’t particularly stellar at any point of the race,” he admitted. “The first stint on hard wasn’t bad, the last stint on soft was pretty good but then there were too many ups and downs and I think that’s really where we need to work is try and find that consistency with this car.”
That swing was hard to square with how Leclerc’s 2026 F1 Hungarian GP weekend had started. Ferrari swept both Friday sessions, with Leclerc topping FP1 and Hamilton leading FP2. They looked every bit the team to beat heading into qualifying.
Consistency, not raw pace, defined Leclerc’s 2026 F1 Hungarian GP as the race swung wildly from one stint to the next. “It’s just been very, very tricky on some stints for Lewis [Hamilton] and some other stints with me. And it’s just a little bit strange how uncorrelated everything is,” he concluded.
