Explaining the state of play in F1 after one-team and one-driver domination gives way to an increasingly competitive multi-way battle for wins at 2024's halfway point; watch every session from the Hungarian GP live on Sky Sports F1, with this Sunday's race starting at 2pm
Wednesday 17 July 2024 23:19, UK
"He's not in a different league, he's in a different galaxy."
The words of Mercedes boss Toto Wolff delivered in a snap, stark assessment of what had just unfolded in 2024's season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix back at the start of March.
Max Verstappen, armed with Red Bull's latest impressive car which had turned heads the week before when it debuted at the same circuit in testing, had started the new campaign where he had left off in his record-breaking last: winning - and winning big.
The reigning champion kicked off his quest for a fourth consecutive drivers' title by leading a Red Bull one-two. Verstappen took the chequered flag 25 seconds ahead of the first Ferrari, 47s ahead of the first Mercedes and 48s ahead of the first McLaren in a 57-lap race of total domination that seemingly threatened to set a one-sided tone for F1's longest-ever year.
Few, therefore, could have foreseen how the picture would look just four months later in early July at the halfway point of the same campaign heading into this weekend's Hungarian Grand Prix, live on Sky Sports F1.
While Verstappen and Red Bull may remain the big world championship favourites thanks to their seven wins so far, the reigning champions' route to wins on a race-by-race basis has increasingly become rather more complicated and competitive with the grid's top four teams all having won at least once so far and the pecking order currently changing from race-to-race and track-to-track...
After just three different drivers won races across 22 races last season, the first 12 rounds of 2024 have already seen six drivers stand atop the podium - Verstappen, Carlos Sainz, Lando Norris, Charles Leclerc, George Russell and Lewis Hamilton.
That's the most in the same timeframe since 2012, when seven drivers won across the first dozen races.
Indeed, underlining the current level of competitiveness at the top of a sport where periods of one or two-team domination occur with regularity, the only other times at least six drivers won across the opening 12 rounds so far this century was 2003 (seven) and 2009 (six).
While their big advantage of last season may have, in the words of Verstappen at last month's Spanish GP, "completely gone", Red Bull do remain firmly in control of both championships despite Sergio Perez's ongoing struggles in their second car.
Verstappen left Silverstone 84 points clear of McLaren's Norris - an advantage which is effectively the equivalent of three race wins and a fifth place - while Red Bull are 71 points ahead of Ferrari.
Both advantages represent healthy leads at the halfway point of a season - although neither are still anywhere near as comfortable as they were for the team after 12 rounds last season when Verstappen led by 125 points (and by 165 over the first non-Red Bull driver in the standings) while Red Bull's advantage was a whopping 256.
The current RB20 remains very fast, the team are super-sharp on strategy, as again evidenced at Silverstone, and, with Verstappen at the wheel at least, are still a big threat for victory on almost every circuit.
But despite the team continuing to add a steady stream of updates to the car, it seems Red Bull's designers, the standard-bearers of the current ground-effect regulation era, are close to finally hitting the development rev limiter of what's possible.
Referring to the sliding scale of wind-tunnel time based on reverse Constructors' Championship position that teams in F1 have access to, Horner said: "It's no secret we have less development time than the others and we're at the top of the curve. So, you're into diminishing returns.
"There is stuff that we have in the pipeline. Whilst we are at the top of curve, there are still gains to be had."
Assessing the reasons for the fluctuating picture at the front, Horner said: "It's all about these tyres. It's all about the tyre working at a certain point in time. At a certain condition, whether it's hot, cold, different cars working the tyres in different ways."
In truth, Verstappen's most recent wins in Canada and Spain owed as much to the Dutchman's stunning driving, and Red Bull's impressive management of races from the pit wall, as any particular pace advantage the RB20 is currently providing.
Had it not been for a slightly underwhelming start to the new campaign when they finished on the podium just once in the first four races, McLaren's season would look even stronger than it already is.
That slow start means they are still behind Ferrari in third in the Constructors' Championship, although they have closed their deficit to second place down to just seven points.
Perhaps more significantly, McLaren have also outscored Red Bull by 37 points in the last six races to cut their deficit to the world champions to a not-yet unsurmountable 78 points with 12 races and three Sprints still to go.
As explained in detail separately, McLaren and Norris could, and arguably should, have been even closer to the championship summits having let several opportunities for more wins slip since the Briton's maiden victory in Miami seven races ago.
Still, the consistency of MCL38 since then suggests there will be further opportunities before the summer break alone for Norris and Oscar Piastri to claim more wins, even if McLaren have been at pains to play down suggestions that they now possess the grid's quickest race car.
"There is this narrative around that McLaren has the best car," pointed out team principal Andrea Stella after the British GP.
"I think we make good use of the car. I would love to empathise the good work of the people that prepare the car [so that] we come to practice sessions and the car performs well and we build well through the weekend.
"But we saw [on race day at the British GP] that not necessarily we have the fastest car because in the first stint when things were pretty regular Mercedes were going [away]. So it's part of the positives. The team are working very well and when you race for the front positions it just becomes much more visible when you still have some work to do."
Like McLaren, Mercedes have also outscored Red Bull over the past six races - although frankly anyone predicting that scenario back at the start of the year would, to borrow the words of Wolff, appear to have been from "another galaxy" themselves such was the mountain of work that still appeared to be ahead for the then-struggling former champions.
Mercedes though head to Hungary this week on the back of consecutive wins for the first time since 2021 thanks to Russell's second career victory in Austria and Lewis Hamilton's emotional ninth Silverstone triumph last time out.
If Russell's win at the Red Bull Ring owed most to the good fortune of being in the right place at the right time to capitalise when Verstappen and Norris ran into each other late in the race, Hamilton's was rather more down to genuine pace and performance on a weekend the much-improved Mercedes W15s locked out the front row and appeared the quickest in certain dry conditions around one of F1's fastest, most aerodynamically-demanding tracks.
Mercedes have promised more upgrades for the Hungary-Belgium double header that takes F1 into its summer break, with the first of those races taking place on a Hungaroring circuit this weekend where the Brackley outfit have taken the last four pole positions, albeit not won since 2020 when they remained the grid's dominant force.
"Hopefully there's more wins to come this season," said Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin.
"We're not happy with two. We want to go after more. So we're still working hard. We've got performance to come, trying to bring that to the car as quickly as we can. It won't be easy, but we will be pushing all the way."
From Red Bull's closest early-season challengers to the recent fourth-fastest team, Ferrari's promising season has nosedived somewhat alarmingly in the four races since Charles Leclerc's impressive home win in Monaco.
The Italian team have only one fortuitous podium - a third place for Carlos Sainz in Austria after the Verstappen-Norris collision - to show for their weekends since then and even reverted to their car's pre-Spanish GP upgrade configuration in wake of the opening day at Silverstone after experiencing problems with bouncing in high-speed corners.
Leclerc's recent races have proved particularly miserable, with the Monegasque failing to score in three of the four.
Still, having remained confident they will get their season back on course soon, F1's visit to Budapest could be especially timely for them with the slower-speed nature of the twisty Hungaroring - which, although not entirely accurately, is often likened to Monaco without the walls - potentially again suiting the SF-24.
It'll be next week's following round at high-speed Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium that should prove more of an acid test of the work they're doing to get back on song.
Team boss Frederic Vasseur after the British GP: "We learned a lot about the car and we made a good step forward which is encouraging for the rest of the season. Now we need to build on what we have learned and apply it to the next couple of races. Everyone in the team, including me, is impatient to get some good results."
Thursday July 18
1.30pm: Drivers' Press Conference
Friday July 19
8.50am: F3 Practice
10am: F2 Practice
12pm: Hungarian GP Practice One (session starts at 12.30pm)
2pm: F3 Qualifying
3pm: F2 Qualifying
3.45pm: Hungarian GP Practice Two (session starts at 4pm)
5:15pm: The F1 Show
Saturday July 20
8:45am: F3 Sprint
11.15am: Hungarian GP Practice Three (session starts at 11.30am)
1.10pm: F2 Sprint
2.15pm: Hungarian GP Qualifying build-up
3pm: Hungarian GP Qualifying
5pm: Ted's Qualifying Notebook
Sunday July 21
7:20am: F3 Feature Race
9am: F2 Feature Race
11am: Porsche Supercup
12:30pm: Grand Prix Sunday: Hungarian GP build-up
2pm: The HUNGARIAN GRAND PRIX
4pm: Chequered Flag: Hungarian GP reaction
5pm: Ted's Notebook
Next up for F1 is the Hungarian Grand Prix from Budapest on July 19-21. You can watch every session live on Sky Sports F1. Stream every F1 race and more with a NOW Sports Month Membership - No contract, cancel anytime
