Analysis: How Hamilton gave Red Bull false hope in Hungarian GP

At first glance the Hungarian GP may appear to have been a little disappointing, and it's inevitable that any race that has 21 finishers, few incidents and virtually no significant passing leaves spectators wanting more.

And yet it was an afternoon of much intrigue, and while we didn't see any passing, we had tense battles for the lead, third place and fifth place that ran all the way to flag.

And while Lewis Hamilton was ultimately in command, Nico Rosberg was right there throughout, waiting to pounce on any mistake. The German's tenacity nearly paid off.

There were two key moments in the race. The first was the start, always a crucial deciding factor at a track where overtaking is so difficult.

And the second came half way through the race, when Daniel Ricciardo and Red Bull put Mercedes under pressure. The world champion team had to hold its strategic nerve and hope that Lewis Hamilton would find extra pace at the right time, which is exactly what he did.

Given Hamilton's history of poor starts in 2016, and the extra element of internal tension added by the yellow flag controversy that helped Rosberg to secure pole, the first lap was always going to be fascinating.

To that you could throw in the fact that the dirty line has traditionally handicapped anyone starting, like Hamilton, from an even numbered spot.

We had a thoroughly entertaining first couple of corners, and in fact the dirty side, didn't prove to be a handicap, presumably a result of the recent resurfacing and/or the heavy rain on Saturday.

Hamilton successfully fended off the Red Bull at the start – it would appear he genuinely didn't know it was Ricciardo – and a cynic might suggest that he actually left the Aussie a little more room than he would have granted his own teammate…

Ricciardo had a good go at it, but in the end he ended up in third, as crucially Rosberg got back into second to restore the Mercedes status quo.

"It was a great start actually, just in terms of a spectacle," Paddy Lowe told Motorsport.com. "The whole top five made pretty good starts. Intuitively it doesn't feel like a very long straight here, but actually it's the fifth longest. It's only 100 metres less than Barcelona. With those longer ones you end up having a tow effect.

"Into Turn One, they were virtually five abreast, weren't they? Our hearts were in our mouths, because it looked like Lewis lost the lead to Ricciardo, but he clung onto it through Turn One.

"And Nico absolutely lost P2 through Turn One, but made a fantastic manoeuvre to get back the second place. It was a great spectacle, and I'm glad to come out of it with a one and two."

The first stint saw Rosberg drift to around 2.5 seconds behind Hamilton, but after the first stops and the switch to soft tyres, the gap came down almost immediately, and within a couple of laps – with Hamilton noting he was "struggling for pace" - it came down to around a second.

That was close as Rosberg could get without losing grip and putting his tyres at risk.

Ricciardo pressure

It was at this stage that the focus turned away from the Mercedes and to the progress of Ricciardo. He had stopped a lap earlier than Hamilton, and two laps before Rosberg, and having initially lost a little time when stuck behind Valtteri Bottas he had really picked up his pace.

Indeed he was closing fast on both the W07s, and he got a little extra motivation when his engineer told him he was a second quicker than them.

A few laps later Hamilton was told "you need to pick up the pace a little bit," to which he replied, "I'm working on it." This was fascinating stuff.

Was Hamilton in tyre trouble, or was he as some suggested indulging in a little gamesmanship and backing Rosberg up, hoping that Nico might get jumped by Ricciardo and lose a few vital points?

Rosberg himself didn't view it that way: "No not at all, I was just fully focussed forwards, I was quite happy that the pace was slow because I was trying to put the pressure on, trying to get some mistakes going from him. I did everything I could, got some mistakes, but not enough to get by."

In fact Hamilton was pacing himself and protecting his soft tyres, as he wasn't sure how they would last over a full stint.

"The problem is that all the teams anticipated it being quite difficult to make the two stop work, on supersofts and two softs," said Lowe. "So there was lot of management out there, let's put it that way. It's very difficult, live within a race, to calibrate the management that's necessary."

"With the tyres it's like having a hundred pounds and spending it over the distance," Hamilton explained.

"I knew what my target was, and I just tried to spend it as wisely as I knew. If I pushed perhaps a little bit more at the beginning, maybe I wouldn't have got to the end the way I needed to. I felt like it was pretty perfectly managed, I didn't have any problems."

The pressing issue for Mercedes was that while Hamilton thought he was doing the right thing, Ricciardo had by become a serious threat, and it was essential that he picked up his pace.

The Ricciardo threat led to a fascinating conversation shortly before half distance where the team made it clear to Hamilton that they might have to pit Rosberg first to protect him from Ricciardo, and that the win might be at risk.

In other words what mattered to Mercedes was the one-two, and if circumstances dictated that Rosberg stopped first to stay ahead of Ricciardo – and in so doing managed to jump Rosberg – then so be it.

"That was the situation," said Lowe. "When you reach a point where the second place guy is under threat from behind, then we need that gap."

Early Red Bull stop

The crunch came was when the Australian made an unexpectedly early second stop on lap 33, putting him onto a fresh set of tyres.

Mercedes made the call to keep both its cars out on the basis that Hamilton could pick up the pace and match Ricciardo with his older tyres, and while doing so pull Rosberg out of harm's way.

"The real stress point was Red Bull went for a very early final stop with Ricciardo," said Lowe. "I'm sure to put us under a lot of pressure. It was a good tactic.

"They were taking the gamble with the early stop, as you would do, because otherwise they were just going to sit and wait and finish P3. It was worth a gamble. As you saw, he could still defend from Vettel at the very end, so that tyre was much better than everybody predicted."

In fact from a Red Bull perspective this was also about keeping Ricciardo safely clear of Sebastian Vettel.

"We were mainly protecting against Sebastian," said Christian Horner.

"Once we reached a point where we believed we were safe until the end of the race, we could see that Sebastian was pushing on with things, trying to get an undercut, so we decided to take the stop and make sure that we got track position and at the same time put Mercedes under a little bit of pressure.

"But what it exposed was that as soon as they were under a little pressure, they were able to turn things up quite a lot..."

"Absolutely we had to cover his pace," said Lowe. "Because we had to assume it was still a final stop, and as we saw to be the case, it's very difficult to overtake. So they took a gamble there, and we had to decide whether to cover it, or whether to stick it out and match his pace, which luckily we were able to do."

At this stage the team made it clear to Hamilton that he really had to get going.

"Lewis didn't know all the information that we knew," said Lowe. "And at the point that it was defined for us by Ricciardo's stop, we were making more direct demands upon him to push the tyres harder.

"And that was ultimately the persuasion that we put to Lewis to speed up. When Ricciardo stopped it was no longer an issue of it would be nice, it was absolutely essential we matched his pace, otherwise we would have lost the win on either car."

Rosberg, meanwhile, didn't expect to see an orchestrated on-track change of positions, as was the case in Monaco.

Fortunately for Mercedes Hamilton did speed up. Having managed his tyres earlier in the stint, and saved a chunk of his £100, he was now able to spend it. Hamilton insisted that Ricciardo's bold strategy was never really on his radar.

"I wasn't really focussed on it," he said. "And I knew I had a lead and I knew what I had to do to stay ahead. I was aware that he had stopped earlier, but I was able to match his times when he did stop, and I was actually quicker, so it was never an issue."

He insisted that even the message that hinted at Rosberg getting the first stop – potentially giving him a chance to steal the lead – had not bothered him: "In my mind it was not going to be changing. I wasn't backing Nico up, and if he was quick enough he could have closed the gap if he wanted to, and challenged. Shortly after that I was able to pick up pace, and then I guess there was never a threat."

Hamilton hits traffic

There were a couple of times when Rosberg got a bit closer. On lap 52 Hamilton got caught up behind Esteban Gutierrez, and the gap briefly came down to 0.6s before it opened up again. And then on lap 62 it shrank to the same margin when Hamilton locked up, as the pressure Rosberg was exerting nearly paid dividends.

"I didn't have any concerns during the race," said Hamilton. "Apart from Turn 12, when I went wide, that was the only moment where I had a slight concern for a moment, because I braked on the bump. Before I was braking after it or before it, and this time it just happened to be perfectly on the bump and caused a lock-up, and I went straight. But otherwise, no..."

Had that moment been a little bit more extreme for Hamilton, Rosberg might have been able to sneak by. But in the end Hamilton stayed safely ahead to the flag:.

"There was a point when Lewis made a mistake at Turn 12 and went wide, and they closed up pretty there," said Lowe.

"We saw from Raikkonen and Verstappen it's a really difficult place to get past, even with a big differential. Which is why it was so essential to cover Ricciardo's early stop, if we'd come out behind him, even if he was struggling in the last five laps, he may well have held it.

"That was the point of maximum tension in the race, apart from the start. In terms of issues it was a very quiet race, fortunately. There were no technical issues."

So a near perfect Sunday for Mercedes, but one that could have gone a little differently had that unpredictable qualifying session not gone the team's way.

Indeed had Sergio Perez not messed up Turn 5 on his final lap in Q2, the Mexican would have comfortably demoted Hamilton to 11th on the grid. And that would have made for a very interesting race...