After grabbing pole position from Max Verstappen by just 0.003 seconds, Hamilton was eager to point out that the DRS edge that Red Bull had earlier in the campaign was gone.
“I mean, they’ve still got the DRS, but they don’t have the DRS advantage all of a sudden that they used to have. Where did that go?” the Mercedes driver told Sky Sports F1.
“They’ve just had an upgrade, so we expected them to have taken another step. We heard it was around two-tenths or something like that, so for them to not have been able to extract that in qualifying is interesting.”
Hamilton’s comments triggered some intrigue about a potential shift in performance for Red Bull, whose RB19 had stood out at earlier in the campaign for its huge straightline speed advantage when DRS was open.
A quick look at the speed traps in Hungary seemed to back up Hamilton’s viewpoint that Red Bull was no longer clear of the opposition in top speed.
Verstappen’s 260.9km/h across the start finish line increased to 304.9km/h by the time he hit the speed trap further down towards Turn 1. This was not much different to Hamilton himself who was 260.3 km/h across the start-finish line and also hit 304.9km/h at the speed trap.
This parity is a world away from what we saw at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix back at the start of the season. This was the race where Hamilton spoke afterwards about having never seen a car so fast in F1 after Verstappen had blasted past him.
In qualifying in Jeddah, Verstappen clocked 311.9km/h across the start-finish line (team-mate Sergio Perez was 315.4km/h), while at the speed trap on the approach to the final corner he was measured at 337.5 km/h. In comparison, Hamilton across the start-finish line was 307.9km/h and at the speed trap was 329.7km/h.
Source: Autosport