Largely beaten by Hamilton, Rosberg does not understand

At the top all weekend, Lewis Hamilton impressed even more during qualifying: 585 thousandths faster than his teammate over one lap, the English driver confirmed he was particularly comfortable on the Hungaroring circuit. He thus confirmed his excellent form: “I love the city, I love the weather, I love the circuit. It’s really a great track – with grip in these conditions, you can really attack like in karting.”

Lewis Hamilton knows that a bad start tomorrow could of course jeopardize everything: « The work is not yet done on Saturday, of course. But it’s an excellent start – in fact, I don’t remember being this strong throughout a whole weekend. But anything can happen at the first corner and during the race. I have confidence in myself, in my car, and in Mercedes, so let’s see how it goes ».

Nico Rosberg was much more sullen after the qualifying. The vice-world champion seemed a little bit lost: “I don’t know why there was such a gap. The qualifying went quite well in the end, but I just didn’t find the rhythm. This weekend has been full of ups and downs for me. We will just have to look into it tonight, but I am clearly not happy with this day.” He nevertheless hopes to recover in the race: “There will be opportunities, thanks to strategy among other things. We will see.”

While he excelled in fast laps in 2014, Nico Rosberg was beaten nine times out of ten by Lewis Hamilton this season. Can the German’s underperformance be explained by poor settings during free practice? Paddy Lowe, Mercedes’ technical director, raised this hypothesis: “We must apologize to Nico, because we only discovered last night that there was a configuration error on his car on Friday, which has not made life easy for him so far.” Due to poor settings, Nico Rosberg suffered from understeer, as confirmed later by Toto Wolff, the team principal.