Red Bulls flex their muscles in Hungary

Teams and drivers had a final hour of practice this morning at the Hungaroring.

This was their last opportunity to get everything dialed in for this afternoon’s crucial qualifying session and tomorrow’s Hungarian GP.

Having both lost some track time yesterday because of mechanical problems on their cars, Heikki Kovalainen and Adrian Sutil were amongst the first to go out on track as the session got underway.

None of the drivers was eager to embark on a proper run as the track conditions were far from ideal following overnight rain. To make matters worse, there was a huge amount of cement dust down on the racing line between Turns 1 and 4, as a result of an incident during the Formula BMW race earlier this morning.

As the first quarter of the session elapsed, Lucas di Grassi, Sakon Yamamoto and Heikki Kovalainen were sent out by their teams. The Finn established his Lotus at the top of the timesheets with a 1’27’’671 but was soon demoted to 2nd by his teammate Trulli. He stroke back seconds later, only for di Grassi to put his Virgin on top. Trulli quickly came back on top with a 1’26’’494.

Other drivers then joined in the action and the new teams’ drivers slowly slipped down the order. Hulkenberg and Alguersuari battled it out for the top spot for a while, until the Red Bulls of Webber and Vettel upped the pace.

The two of them were up in front with 34 minutes remaining. Vettel lowered the benchmark shortly before the halfway point and the gap of over one second to third place was restored.

Fernando Alonso managed to cut this gap down to 0.860 as they entered into the final third of the session, but Webber improved on his teammate’s mark to go top with a 1’19’’940. It meant the gap between the Australian and third-placed Alonso was back to just over one second.

Most of the field got back out on track for a final run at the end of the session. Both Red Bulls found some improvements but were unable to put the hammer down as they encountered some traffic on their final laps. It was still enough to keep them both on top of the field.

Alonso was 3rd fastest, 1.1 second down on Webber but ‘only’ 0.6s down on Vettel. Kubica took his Renault to fourth fastest ahead of Massa. Hamilton, Petrov, Rosberg, Button and Hulkenberg completed the top ten.

Force India’s Tonio Liuzzi only completed eight laps in this session due to a driveshaft problem. In order not to cause greater problems on the car, the team preferred to have him sit out the second half of the session.