Mercedes drivers hugely disappointed after tough qualifying session

George Russell blamed himself for getting knocked out in the first qualifying segment while Lewis Hamilton was left slightly frustrated after failing to fight for the top positions.

Hot on the heels of his emotional victory at Silverstone, Lewis Hamilton was expecting to continue his upward trajectory in Hungary where he has already won eight times.

However, the seven-time world champion appeared to struggle with his W15's balance in practice session, and he was off the pace in qualifying as well.

"It’s been very difficult to find a balance with the car this weekend where it’s not snappy," he noted. "That has likely been exacerbated by the heat but, even in the cooler conditions today, we still struggled.

"It was a real challenge to get the tyres working and we couldn’t quite get them to where we wanted. If we had optimised everything, we could have likely gone one tenth or two quicker, but we didn’t have enough to challenge for pole position today.

"Tomorrow is forecast to be, like Friday, very warm. That will make it a challenge, but everyone is in the same boat. It will be interesting to see where our speed is relative to those around us. Our long run pace in practice was solid but we will have to wait and see where we fall out tomorrow," said Hamilton.

His team-mate George Russell’s qualifying got off to a terrible start, as he couldn’t extract any pace from his W15 on multiple push laps.

In trouble, he came back out after the red flags on a wetter track, and improved on his first run. But he ran out of fuel to complete his second run as the track dried further. As a result, he will only line up in P17 in today's Mogyoród F1 race.

"We didn’t do a good enough job today. I was unable to put a lap together earlier in Q1 and that had left us vulnerable near the cut-off. After the red flag, we were on track at its most damp and then we didn’t have enough fuel complete a push lap as it was at its most dry.

"We should have been comfortably through and that is frustrating. We shouldn’t have been in that position though in the first place and that’s on me. We will go through it tonight to understand what happened, what went wrong, and how to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

"P17 is clearly not where we should be qualifying. We should have a car to battle back into the points tomorrow though. We have shown good speed throughout practice and our long run pace was encouraging. Tomorrow is a new day, and we will see what we can achieve," said Russell.

"That was a very disappointing Qualifying session for us today. It was a total underperformance from all of us. Losing a car in Q1 is clearly not acceptable. George struggled to get in a solid lap earlier in the session and we didn’t execute the final run at all.

"That stemmed from a lack of solid communication between ourselves and the driver. We need to ensure we learn from this so that it doesn’t happen again.

"Lewis made it through to Q3 but ultimately, we didn’t have the pace to challenge for much more than P5. We were likely a couple of tenths slower than those ahead in normal conditions anyway, but we were struggling to get on top of the tyre temperatures.

"It was tricky to find the middle ground and that likely cost us a few more tenths. We need to dust ourselves down and come back stronger tomorrow. It will be a long race so hopefully we can create some opportunities.