Scuderia Ferrari has scored its 11th podium of the season at the Hungarian Grand Prix, last GP of the first half of 2019 season. The summer break is already started after the Hungarian podium celebration this afternoon but It is shame that the Prancing Horse still haven't made a GP win!

Only 9 races left after today's GP and Sebastian Vettel's barren spell with Ferrari extends to a gloomy 20 GP without a win since his last win in 2018's Spa GP. Vettel came home third, while Charles Leclerc came home fourth right behind his team-mate, the two drivers having run different tire strategies. Leclerc who still waiting for "redemption time" to win a race is still waiting for the time to come.

The veteran driver still holds No. 1 status at Ferrari mainly because of his experience as he got an appropriate strategy compared to Leclerc who he was able to take on Soft tires at his one and only stop just like Seb's. 

Both Ferrari were faraway by nearly 1 minute behind Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton who battled for the first place at the Hungaroring. It seems there is no competition between the top three teams however, Ferrari continues the same weakness they showed this year in terms of putting strategies and the fact of having a lack of downforce in the car too.

P3: Sebastian Vettel: “We leave Hungary and for a few weeks we can console ourselves with the fact that we made it to the podium in a race in which we knew we were going to struggle.

“Today, we simply could not match the pace of our rivals. In terms of strategy, the idea was to come up with something different to try and do better than fourth. I managed to extend the first stint to 39 laps and that allowed me to fit Softs and have a stronger pace than Charles in the closing stages.

“Now we can recharge our batteries and prepare to battle once more in Spa and Monza, tracks where we ought to be more competitive. We know there is still some performance to come from the SF90 and we have to work on that, but I am convinced that there is a margin to get better results.”

P4: Charles Leclerc: “Arriving in Hungary we knew it would be a tough race for us, and it was. The beginning of the first stint wasn’t bad, but as the race progressed, I started to struggle with my rear tires more and more and could not match the pace of our competitors.

“My target now is to understand how to improve this, especially over long runs and on circuits where the degradation is high. I look forward to returning to racing after the break so that we can continue working on making further improvements and give our competitors a good challenge.”

Mattia Binotto Team Principal: “We can’t take satisfaction from today’s result when what was mainly to blame was a lack of aero downforce, which at the moment penalizes us even more in the race than in qualifying. The hot conditions did not help and actually caused us more problems in terms of reduced grip levels.

“Sebastian did a good job of managing the tires in the first stint, thus lengthening it, which meant he could fit the softs and run with them to the chequered flag. However, we have to understand why Charles’ tires wore so much and fix for the coming races. We pitted him, as his rears were very used and there was nothing else we could do.

“From a track on which we knew we would struggle, we still head home with the same number of points of our closest rivals.

“Next week we will continue to work on analyzing data and preparing for the next two races in Spa and Monza, however, before then we have the summer break which will be good for the entire team, that has really worked so hard over the past few months.”

The championship now takes its usual summer break before the action resumes with the Belgian Grand Prix on 1st September.