After a long while, it was time to head off to another journey, a new adventure, so to speak. The trip itself has been in the making for quite some time, but the idea behind it, at least in my head, goes even further back. We’ll get to the main reason of the trip to Budapest, and surrounding areas, later on in this post, but for now, let’s just say it’s sports related again, of course.
With all of my different sports interests, one of the main ones, at least lately, has been Formula 1. As you may have read on my blog already, I’ve been following the sport ever since I was a small kid, but over the last few years, that interest has grown a lot more again. A few years ago, back in 2022, I already had a plan to go see a Formula 1 race live, at a circuit, but that plan fell through unfortunately. Fast forward to the end of 2025, when some of my coworkers and I were talking about it, and we came up with the idea to actually go see a race together!
And this is where the reason for this trip came from. The race at Hungaroring, about 30mins of driving away from Budapest, at the best of times, was one of the options on the table at the time, the other was Austria, since those two are the closest to us. We settled on Hungary, because the whole “travel package” seemed less expensive than in Austria. But also, getting to see such a beautiful city as Budapest definitely is while we’re at it, is surely just an added bonus!
To be fair though, we haven’t really been able to explore much of the city itself. We did go on a couple of walks in the evening, but the rest of our time there was spent at the race track anyway. On Friday, we got up at a normal time let’s say, around 7 in the morning. Since we didn’t have any breakfast items, we had to visit a store real quick, which was thankfully just 30 seconds away from our Airbnb, and we were on our way to the track just after 8am. It took just over an hour to get to the parking space, due to the traffic around the race track, but it passed by so quickly anyway!
I’ve been following Formula 1, as well as Formula 2 and 3, for quite a long while now, but one thing is seeing the cars on TV, while seeing them in person, from the grandstand, is just a completely different feeling of course. The thing that kind of surprised me the most was the noise. I knew that Formula 2, Formula 3 and especially the Porsche Super Cup cars were loud, but no words can quite accurately express how loud they actually are. At first I thought I’d be just fine without any ear plugs or anything, but let me tell you that it was a good decision to take my earphones with me, just in case, because they came in real handy on Saturday, but also on Sunday for some of the races.
Friday is usually the day for free practice sessions, and a couple of qualifying sessions in the “junior” series, so despite a lot going on on the track itself, it wasn’t super interesting to watch it all. It was fun seeing the cars on track of course, but once they’ve gone past us a couple of times, that was pretty much all there was to see. One other thing, it was a very windy day there on Friday, despite the temperatures being quite pleasant, around 25C, we were literally shaking in our seats on the grandstand. That’s why we took advantage of every moment that we could get to get out of our seats and away from the wind. I did end up buying a Hungaroring hoodie to help with the cold, since it was relatively fairly priced, considering the prices of all the F1 merch, and that helped massively.
As we were discussing what to do for the rest of the weekend, in terms of getting to the track on Saturday and Sunday, we read suggestions that we should be there very very early, to avoid the worst of the traffic and queues to get through the gates. On Saturday, we decided to get to the track even before they start letting people in, which was at 7:30 in the morning. So we left our Airbnb around 6:45, and were already at the gates with 10 minutes to spare. Getting to the parking space was nothing out of the ordinary, without any traffic jams or anything. Once again, we spent a huge majority of the day at the race track, thankfully the wind died down on that day so it was pleasantly warm even in the shade of the grandstand. Saturday brought some actual racing action with it, with Formula 2 and 3 sprint races, as well as Formula 1 qualifying, which made the day a lot more interesting than the previous one.
The final day of our trip was of course Sunday, and that’s also the main event day, so naturally the place felt even more packed than it did in the previous couple of days. We came to the track a little later than the day before, left our Airbnb around 8:15, and arrive just after 10 in the morning, because of all the traffic and the chaos around the circuit. We spent some time walking around the track again, just to see what it’s like in other sections of the track, but once the races were underway, I pretty much haven’t left my seat throughout the rest of the day.
We have finally arrived to the main event of the whole weekend – the Formula 1 Hungarian Grand Prix. From everything we have seen throughout the weekend, I could have been quite hopeful for a good result for my team, which is Ferrari, but unfortunately that wasn’t quite the case. I will say it again, it was amazing to be at the circuit, see the cars fly past the grandstand, but during the race itself, you only knew what was going on for a couple of cars that you were able to see on the big screen, while you had no idea what was going on with all the rest that zoomed by.
Overall, it was an amazing experience! Not going to say that it was one of a kind, because hopefully there will be many more visits to F1 race tracks, including Hungaroring, but it was definitely an unforgettable one and a one that we needed, to see how things go, and what we can do differently next time around. And there will definitely be a next time, that’s a fact! I did come home pretty exhausted, as you can imagine, but I wouldn’t have changed a single thing about the whole trip!
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