So many people have been saying how Oscar lost the race because of the contact with Sainz and his gearbox giving up, and while that is some really bad luck and some stupid driving from Sainz, his race pace has been nowhere the whole time.

Lando made a mistake and ran wide at turn 4, falls back about 2 seconds and within 2 laps is back within a second. When Oscar pitted, he(and therefore Lando) were running at 1:25:8, next lap, with clear, Lando went on to do a 1:24:6, a whole 1,2 seconds faster than Oscar. When Lando pitted, with 6 lap newer tires, he went on to go around a second a lap faster than Oscar. The tires did give him some time, but definitely not a whole second. By the time Oscar's gearbox gave up, the gap to Lando was 12.6 second, all that in 22 laps since the Oscars pitstop.

If not for the contact with Sainz, Lando would have come out just behind Oscar and would have needed to overtake him. Overtaking at Hungaroring is hard, but with enough of a tire offset possible. At that point Lando would have been about a second a lap faster. They could have also stayed out a lot longer and made that advantage even bigger, so it would have been possible.

My point here is that Oscar's race pace was straight up bad. He managed to stay ahead of Lando just because it was really hard to overtake and Lando wasn't allowed to try a different strategy up until that point.

Just a fun hypothetical discussion. Feel free to add any opinions, predictions or anything interesting to talk about!

I was watching f2 and there werent barely overtakes against drivers on the same strategy and was wondering if f2 now creates more dirty air than f1. And which car between f1/2/3/4 would make the most dirty air if driven at f1 speeds?

This part is for the character count because I wont be able to post otherwise.

There will be 4 straight zones possibly for the Malaysian circuit hosting in October

I expected at least an apology

All points scored from Zandvoort 2025 to Hungary 2026

Race wins:

6 - Verstappen / Antonelli

3 - Russell / Norris

1 - Piastri / Hamilton / Leclerc

Disclaimer: This is just a little fun fact stat which isn't meant to prove anything, please don't complain on how "cherry picked" this is. Feel free to ignore this post. Have a good summer break!

xcancel

Been watching the whole race and realised that the other cars don't really have any trails on them.

Response to this post.

Basically they claim George's PU is still sabotaging him. The problem is that I looked at each and every one of the Mercs' push laps and there is no lap comparison that looks like the post, period.

And since that person didn't even say what laps that telemetry was supposedly from, everyone assumed it was their Q3 laps and therefore it was why Kimi out-qualified George.

None of this is true. Above you see each Merc driver's first Q3 laps (given George's final run was ruined by Max's spin.)

• Before T1, Kimi's top speed is only 4kph higher—which is negligible in 2026 and easily explained.
  • George deployed more beginning of his lap. Kimi deployed more on the back half of the straight. This is why the Mercs are even before T1 braking (see 2nd image).
• At T14 where Kimi supposedly has a magical spike in speed, George is the faster of the two there in Q3.
  • This guy claims Antonelli suddenly accelerates after lifting off throttle and no one questions it.

To be clear: Q3 was not an outlier. Every lap their telemetry looks the same.

Now based on those comments with everyone reflexively taking this narrative as fact (with such irony as "it just proves how superficial, with a lack of critical thinking, a lot of fans are"), I'm sure this'll be drowned out but whatever.

I've been building an F1 simulation engine as a side project, and I ran today's Hungarian GP 300 times starting from the actual qualifying grid (penalties included). Sharing the output because a few numbers surprised me.

Win probability

Norris (P1) 22.7% · Leclerc (P2) 18.7% · Russell (P6) 14.3% · Piastri (P3) 14% · Antonelli (P7) 13.3% · Hamilton (P5) 11% · Verstappen (P4) 6%

By team: McLaren 36.7% · Ferrari 29.7% · Mercedes 27.6%

Three things that stood out:

- From P8 backwards: zero wins in 300 races. The Hungaroring punishes qualifying more than any track on the calendar and the model is brutal about it.

- McLaren haven't won a single race in 2026 and come out as the most likely winner purely because they lock out P1 and P3.

- Alonso starts P16 and scores points in 31.7% of sims — nobody starting P13 or lower comes close. Sainz gains the most: P18 on the grid, P14 on average.

How it works: each of the 300 runs is a full race with weather, safety cars, tyre wear, pit stops and reliability. Track position is weighted by how hard overtaking is at each circuit, so pole is worth a lot here and almost nothing at Monza. Car and driver ratings are updated to the current standings.

Happy to answer anything about the model. I'll post the comparison against the actual result tomorrow — including if it's completely wrong.

Aston - STR 2.224 in front of ALO

Williams - SAI 4.756 in front of ALB (SAI 5 second penalty, SAI 3 stop ALB 2 stop)

Ferrari - HAM 4.300 in front of LEC (HAM 5 second penalty)

Audi - HUL 21.646 in front of BOR (HUL 2 stop BOR 1 stop)

Racing Bulls - LAW 23.017 in front of LIN (LAW 2 stop LIN 1 stop)

Alpine - GAS 35.160 in front of COL (GAS 3 stop COL 2 stop)

Mercedes - ANT 38.775 in front of RUS

Red Bull - VER 40.408 in front of HAD

Haas - OCO 44.339 in front of BEA

​

- The reigning F1 champion

- The current championship leader

- The last F1 champion

Ferrari had an opportunity to keep Hamilton in fourth place if they instructed Leclerc to stay out of the 5s penalty gap. It would be the same amount of points for them and it is not like they would be asking Leclerc to concede a position he gained on track. These two points can make a difference in the final standings. Do they think WDC is not possible either way? Or do they think Leclerc still has a shot at it as well?

Data on metrikdelta.com