Norris strikes as Leclerc suffers horrid Hungary crash

McLaren's Lando Norris set the pace at the end of second practice for the Hungarian Grand Prix but it was a session to forget for Charles Leclerc.

Norris finished a quarter-of-a-second quicker than Red Bull's three-time F1 champion Max Verstappen after a shortened burst of soft-tyre running as teams were forced to change their plans after 16 minutes of track time were lost courtesy of Leclerc.

After just 16 minutes of the hour-long session at the Hungaroring, Ferrari driver Leclerc ran marginally wide out of the high-speed Turn 4 left-hander, his SF-24 seemingly bottoming out on entry, resulting in the right-hand side of the car riding too far over on the kerbing.

Out of shape on exit, Leclerc's car immediately went into a spin, resulting in him hitting a barrier at pace with the rear wing. Resultant momentum then saw him bounce off and spin again, before clouting the barrier a second time with the front-left wheel.

The session was immediately red-flagged, primarily to carry out barrier repairs, leading to a 16-minute delay. For Leclerc, though, he missed out on 45 minutes of crucial running given the Ferraris are carrying a revised floor this weekend in the hope of ending its poor run of results.

At the time of the incident, Sergio Perez was the surprise frontrunner. It took just five minutes for Carlos Sainz's leading soft-tyre time from FP1 to be beaten, with the Red Bull driver clocking a 1:18.568s and on the mediums, notably with track temperatures 10 degrees cooler than earlier in the day.

On his opening lap on his first medium run of the day, after using a single set of softs in the first session, Verstappen declared his brakes to be "not working, they're not biting", leaving him 0.645s adrift of Perez.

The only anomaly to the early running was the fact that McLaren duo Norris and Oscar Piastri were using the hard tyres, compared to the remainder of the field all using the yellow-striped Pirellis. Norris was at least holding his own with the seventh-best time early on.

Verstappen's next push lap saw him move to within 0.156s of Perez, nudging Mercedes duo George Russell and Lewis Hamilton down the pecking order to third and fourth on the timesheet.

With key running time lost on the mediums, when the session restarted, the remaining 19 drivers headed out on softs to carry out a necessary part of the run plan for teams in this session.

As Norris hit the top spot with a 1:17.788s, Stake's Zhou Guanyu and Perez avoided what could have been a horror collision.

Emerging out of Turn 4, Zhou suffered a similar moment to Leclerc 20 minutes earlier, with his car going into a spin. Unlike Leclerc who hit a barrier, Zhou narrowly missed hitting Perez courtesy of cat-like reactions from the Mexican to move out of the way.

Zhou blamed Perez for being on his line coming out of the corner, forcing him to hit the brakes. The stewards, however, disagreed as the incident was not investigated.

Longer running resumed for the final 15 minutes as the teams tried to get back on track.

Naturally, the leading times remained unaltered, with Sainz next best behind Norris and Verstappen, albeit four-tenths of a second behind the Briton.

Remarkably, from Sainz down to 14th-placed Esteban Ocon in his Alpine, just half a second separated 12 drivers.

Perez, in desperate need of a strong weekend, finished fourth quickest, and in an RB20 not carrying the same upgrade package as team-mate Verstappen, with his car shy of the engine cover and sidepods.

Russell was 0.506s back in fifth, followed by Kevin Magnussen in his Haas, Hamilton, RB's Daniel Ricciardo, Williams' Alex Albon and Fernando Alonso in a heavily revamped Aston Martin. The two-time F1 champion was 0.731s adrift in 10th.

Zhou, after his heartstopping near-miss, brought up the rear, 2.279s down on Norris, albeit on the mediums after his soft-tyre burst was ruined.