Dre’s Race Review – F1’s 2024 Hungarian Grand Prix Of Sass

Oscar Piastri wins his first Grand Prix in dubious circumstances as McLaren forces Lando Norris to step aside. Dre on an important week of racing in Hungary.

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Read time: 7 mins

“McLaren with a 2-1 Finish.”

Well… that was an interesting finish to the Hungarian Grand Prix, wasn’t it? I love that McLaren somehow tried to fumble a 1-2 finish, and still finished with a comfortable 1-2 finish. Because this quickly became a Grand Prix of Sass, and Max Verstappen looked as vulnerable as he has all season. Let’s get into this. *boils kettle*

It’s actually startling looking back on this one just how easy it should have been for McLaren to wrap this sucker up and absolutely hit Red Bull where it hurt. And while they did, I do wonder at what emotional damage it might cause. 

Lando Norris got a poor start from his pole position and ended up briefly third, with Oscar Piastri taking the early lead. After Max gave the position back for running wide at Turn 1, Piastri had a three second lead through the first stint. That gap dropped down to about two seconds after Piastri ran wide at the treacherous Turn 11, but still held Norris off well. 

Then for the final round of stops, they pitted Norris on a 2-lap undercut and claimed that Hamilton was a threat from behind. He wasn’t. He ended up 15 seconds off the win despite what happened at the end of the race. But Norris came back out with a 3 second lead and pushed hard. This led to his race engineer Will Joseph using less and less coded language to say: “Give that place back you little shit.” It quickly turned from saving tyres at a bunch of corners to. “Do the right thing.”, “Remember all those Sunday Morning meetings”, etc. At a certain point, I thought he was going to write Lando a goddamn sonnet in the style of MacBeth:

With just a handful of laps to go, Joseph gave Norris a direct order to step aside. Norris was going to wait for the final lap, but eventually obliged early incase of a late Safety Car. Apparently, this was the plan all along. But I find that hard to believe given the playing down on the radio of the situation by Norris and asking Piastri to catch up while he was blatantly still pushing himself.

And it’s hard to blame Norris for the attitude. You’re asking a man with one career win, the lead antagonist in this Championship to give up a win. The ultimate team order call, and even more importantly seven extra points in the fight against Max Verstappen. It was 84 points going into this race and you’re unlikely to get a better chance to go +15 on Max and try and make Red Bull sweat over BOTH title campaigns. 

And amazingly… I don’t think McLaren was ruthless enough. Oscar Piastri is a great talent and will only get better in time, but the reality is he entered this race 42 points behind Lando, and if McLaren wants to challenge on all fronts, the best case scenario is Lando Norris winning this 1-2 and McLaren is as efficient as it can possibly be. Instead, they put themselves into an absolute pickle that was completely avoidable, to the point where they’re begging and grovelling to their star driver to maintain the “vibes”. 

It’s a horrible look and it completely overshadowed what was a dominant 1-2 victory that should cement the status that McLaren is now the team to beat in the sport as the Summer Break quickly approaches. It overshadowed the first Hamilton/Verstappen clash on track since Brazil 2022, it was wild.

For now though, all I hope is that Max Verstappen doesn’t win the Championship by six points or less. Because if that happens, this day will be remembered in infamy. 

Before I start, let me recognise my privilege as a cis-gendered, straight black man writing this post. While I’m not the ideal person to write about a subject matter that doesn’t directly affect me, I want to be the best ally I can be and I hope I can add to the conversation with the best of intentions.

This was meant to be a great week for queer representation within Motorsport. For those, Williams, Jordan and Toyota’s former F1 driver, Ralf Schumacher, six-time Grand Prix winner came out on Instagram with his partner. In his own words: “The most beautiful thing in life is when you have the right partner by your side with whom you can share everything.”

Now, I need to be balanced here in stating that Ralf isn’t batting 1,000 on the subject matter (No one does), I need to point out that he’s not always been the biggest fan of the public activism of drivers like Lewis Hamilton in years past. Still, I do wonder if holding onto some internal guilt himself as a gay man who wasn’t comfortable being so in an F1 paddock may have had something to do with it. 

It sucked to hear from those who are deeper in the sport’s news circles than I that there had been rumours about his sexuality circulating for some time because that’s the sort of thing that almost certainly is not done in good faith. But I was heartened to see the overwhelmingly positive support in the comments from people like tennis legend Boris Becker, McLaren CEO Zak Brown and Ralf’s son, David. Also glad that F1 itself wrote a positive official statement on the matter as well.

This means something. Ralf is a Schumacher, part of one of the most iconic names and dynasties in racing, now spanning two generations. In a sport that struggles so badly to embrace any representation at all, to see one of the sport’s most recognisable names be open with who he is and try to live his best life in a paddock that absolutely doesn’t reflect modern-day society, I can only hope does the same for others. Because if you’ve been in this space for as long as I have (13 years as an F1 content creator in September), we all know deep down that this isn’t a diverse game. Not even close.

On all fronts, from team compositions to the media, to the content creators and beyond, Motorsport is a straight-white male game and people like me have had to work very hard to push beyond that. 

I’m fortunate to have been one of the few who has “made it” to The Race via WTF1, and now the Motorsport Network. But Motorsport101 has always been my passion and baby, and it isn’t where it is today without the LGBTQ+ community. Between RJ O’Connell my wonderful co-host, Edwin Hamilton, Adam Johnson, and other guests, over 80% of our Podcast’s history has had at least one voice from the LGBTQ+ community, as well as many other members who back us on Patreon or are in our Discord, something I’m immensely proud of. 

We aren’t a huge show by any means (I jump up and down if an episode we make cracks 500 plays), but in my eyes, our representation makes us better, and a genuine outlier and alternative to so much of the sport’s current coverage. 

PS: Once again, I beg, can F1’s media please ask more people than Lewis Hamilton about these kinds of moments? I’ve said before that it’s bad optics that the sport’s one black figure has been moulded into being the media’s ethics officer for anything political outside of the sport directly. There are 20 drivers in the paddock, and the burden of social issues must also fall to others.

PS x2: I’m disappointed that my friends at Racing Pride, the company pushing for LGBTQ+ inclusion this very week, had to backpedal and accept the resignation of a volunteer director who was sharing horrific transphobic views, agreeing on UK Member of Parliament Wes Streeting’s push for a ban on puberty blockers that could potentially cause untold damage to children who need critical gender-affirming care.

While I’m glad the situation was resolved quickly, it only adds caution and doubt towards their greater goals. I disagreed with their endorsement of Caitlyn Jenner in the W Series in 2022 and their silence on both Jenner and driver Jamie Chadwick’s comments on segregating trans women and the fact a director was on their board with similar opinions damages my trust in them.

The “T” is just as important as every other letter you choose to represent. In the UK political climate and beyond, it’s arguably even more important right now. Trans rights are human rights. End of discussion.

Red Bull… phew. That was a messy, messy race and for the first time in a while, the rest of the team didn’t back Verstappen up. The big upgrade package that was designed for high-downforce tracks like Hungary either didn’t work at all, or wasn’t as effective as they were hoping for, because Red Bull just weren’t at the races. And strategically they weren’t on point either, they got themselves in no mans land by staying out too long on their first stint, and and then got undercut on the second. Just sloppy work all round, with Max’s lock-up and clattering into Hamilton summing his day up. He was lucky his car was still in one piece by day’s end. 

Whisper it quietly, but… Lance Stroll is driving really well at the moment. I don’t know how much of this is directly him, or if Fernando Alonso’s mentally checked out with Aston Martin nowhere in terms of the sports performance ladder. But look, if we’re not talking about Stroll relatively speaking, that’s a good thing. 

No, I haven’t forgotten about Sergio Perez, who is cheeks until said otherwise. More on him, mid-week. Stay tuned. 

About the Author:

Dre Harrison

Somehow can now call himself a Production Coordinator at the Motorsport Network, coming off the back of being part of the awkward Johto Era at WTF1. All off a University Project that went massively out of hand. Weird huh?

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