Lewis Hamilton said his Mercedes felt “at its worst” as he set the 16th-fastest time in Friday practice at the Hungarian Grand Prix.
His frustrations were heightened by a new approach to tyre allocation being tried at this race that has limited the number of sets available to drivers.
World champion Max Verstappen, only 11th fastest, also complained about it.
Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc set the pace on a day that offered few clues as to the true competitive picture.
The so-called ‘alternative tyre allocation’ reduces the number of tyre sets over a weekend from 13 to 11, changes the distribution across the three available compounds, and forces drivers to use hard tyres in first qualifying, mediums in second and softs in the top-10 shootout.
The idea is to reduce tyre usage on sustainability grounds.
The result was that teams ran fewer sets of tyres in Friday practice – the Mercedes drivers, for example, used only one set of medium-compound tyres for the entire day.
Hamilton said: “I only had one tyre. Not really a great format this change they made for this weekend.
“It just means we get less running. Not ideal. There are a lot of wet tyres they throw away every weekend – a lot. Maybe they should look at that rather than taking time on track away from the fans.”
Verstappen, who ran just two sets of soft tyres in the second session, said: “We haven’t used a lot of tyre sets today. With this new format, you are super-limited with the tyres you can use, and I didn’t want to use them today to have a bit more of a better preparation tomorrow.
“It’s a bit of a shame. There are so many people around and you basically don’t really run a lot, and we will have to see what we can do to improve that because we are basically just saving tyres which is not the correct thing.”
McLaren’s Lando Norris, who was just 0.015 seconds slower than Leclerc in second place overall, said that the wet weather in the first session of the day had prevented the idea looking even worse.
“We were lucky it rained otherwise pretty much no-one would have done anything in P1,” Norris said.
Hamilton said of his car: “It wasn’t feeling good. It was feeling like the car at its worst today, but we will work on our set-up tonight.
“Last year it felt terrible at the beginning and we turned it around and did some set-up changes. We will work on that tonight and hopefully tomorrow it will feel better.”
How does performance look?
Verstappen has a major upgrade on his Red Bull, with much narrower cooling openings in the sidepods to enable a more extensive undercut to increase airflow and downforce, but said it was “hard to comment” on the car’s performance because of the limited running.
“The car felt not too bad,” he said. “Looked quite competitive on the long run.”
Verstappen was indeed quicker than the Ferraris on the race-simulation runs, with both using the soft tyre.
McLaren, Mercedes and Aston Martin used the mediums for their long runs, and Norris was fastest, ahead of Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin and the Mercedes of George Russell and Hamilton.
On headline times, the Alpines of Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon were third and fifth fastest, sandwiching Yuki Tsunoda’s Alpha Tauri.
Verstappen’s team-mate Sergio Perez, whose day got of to a bad start with a crash on his first lap of the first session, finished the day 18th overall.
What about Ricciardo’s return?
Daniel Ricciardo, returning to Formula 1 with Alpha Tauri this weekend, was 14th, 0.451secs slower than his team-mate.
The Australian was the big focus of the day, after he was drafted in following the sacking of Dutchman Nyck de Vries last week.
Ricciardo drove a steady session as he set about learning his new car, starting well over a second behind Tsunoda and edging closer. He had more or less matched the Japanese driver’s time by the end of his running on his first set of tyres but Tsunoda moved clear on their qualifying runs on the soft tyre.
“Positions is not too relevant at the moment,” Ricciardo said. “Today was more to feel where I am with the car. It all felt pretty familiar. It felt in a way like I never really left.
“This afternoon, a little bit to find on the new tyre but nothing I’m concerned about. The car felt OK.
“A bit more out of me (on Saturday) and some things in the car we can try and work on. It looked like Yuki also had a pretty good day so if we can put all the things together we can do OK.”
Bad timing for another Perez error
With Ricciardo returning, the last thing Perez needed was a difficult day, but that’s what he had after he dropped his outside wheels on to the grass on his entry to Turn Five at the start of first practice and crashed into the wall.
Perez’s remarks over the radio immediately after the crash – “I can’t believe this” – made it clear that he understood the potential seriousness of the error.
Team principal Christian Horner said: “He just misjudged it. It was just a mistake. You could hear the frustration in his voice.”
Perez’s early-season ambition of challenging team-mate Verstappen for the championship has collapsed as his season has imploded following a series of errors.
Ricciardo has said his dream is to go well enough in the Alpha Tauri to again earn a seat at Red Bull.
Perez, who has a Red Bull contract for 2024, said on Thursday that Ricciardo’s return “doesn’t change anything” for him, insisting that his future was “in my hands”.
Horner has said that he believed Perez’s problem was that he had been putting too much pressure on himself, and added after the British Grand Prix that Perez “just needs a clean weekend”.
That hope is already forlorn in Hungary, although he was somewhat fortunate that the rain in the first session, which started just after his accident, meant he did not miss out on the learning other drivers would otherwise have had.
