Kevin Magnussen: “It seems this weekend we’ve been a little bit less competitive”

Kevin Magnussen admits the Haas F1 Team have not been as competitive as they would have liked to have been this weekend at the Hungaroring, but he feels from thirteenth on the grid, he can fight for points on Sunday.

The Dane has been running with an updated package this weekend in Hungary, but as with any upgrade, it takes time to understand it and get the most out of it, but he felt he did as much as he could under the circumstances.

Magnussen says the car has been feeling better with heavy fuel this weekend, which give him hope he can advance from his grid slot and fight for a top ten finish on Sunday afternoon.

“You always want to make Q3 and it wasn’t one of our best qualifying sessions but it seems this weekend we’ve been a little bit less competitive,” said Magnussen.  “There’s a lot of work going into it but it’s one of those things that will take time to extract the most out of it.

“From P13, I think you can fight for points. The pace looked alright on the long run, certainly the car felt good in FP2 with high-fuel, if anything a little bit better than low-fuel.

“We’ll take what we can tomorrow and go and have some fun.”

“It was tougher than what I would’ve hoped for” – Mick Schumacher

Team-mate Mick Schumacher admitted his Qualifying was a lot tougher than he was hoping for, and he will find himself starting from fifteenth on the grid on Sunday.

Schumacher knows it will be difficult to progress on Sunday if there are not any safety cars, with the Hungaroring notoriously difficult to overtake on, even if the 2022 cars offer drivers a better chance of staying close to the car ahead.

“It was tougher than what I would’ve hoped for,” said Schumacher.  “It was quite a chaotic sequence of laps but on the other hand it’s qualifying, and you’ve got to try some stuff, and with the upgrade package the gap was a bit bigger than what we wanted it to be.

“Our car isn’t bad, we still have the opportunity to go forwards and how far forwards is the question. If there’s a race from start to finish with no safety cars, maybe it will be a bit difficult to overtake, but we’ll give it a shot.”

Mick Schumacher will start only fifteenth in Hungary – Credit: Octane Photographic Ltd