Kevin Magnussen was left baffled after being far from competitive this weekend at the Hungaroring, but admitted that with such little track time, getting within a thousandth of a second of advancing to the second phase of qualifying was a good effort.
The Haas F1 Team was restricted to just a handful of laps on Friday, mainly due to Antonio Giovinazzi taking over his car for free practice 1 and watching the Italian crash, which resulted in a long repair job for his mechanics that ate into free practice 2, and although he was able to have some more running on Saturday morning, he felt under-prepared for qualifying.
However, despite this, he set an identical time to that of Sergio Perez and only missed out on advancing to the second phase of qualifying because the Mexican driver set the time first.
“We haven’t been competitive this weekend, for some reason,” said Magnussen. “We were expecting to be okay here. We knew it wasn’t going to be the best because of the slow corners, but at least it’s a short, twisty track without big straights.
“We shouldn’t be too bad in theory, but we haven’t had the pace. On top of that, it’s been a difficult weekend not doing Friday. Well, I did four laps on Friday and a few more this morning. It’s not good preparation to go into qualifying.
“I made the most of it. I was only one hundredth of a second from Romain and I had the same lap time as Perez who was P15, so Q2 was right there. So with that little running, I’m quite happy with that.”
