Hispania Racing's Bruno Senna is expecting a 1-second improvement in laptime tomorrow when he reverts to an old car set-up, after struggling with the improving track conditions in second practice this afternoon. The team opted to try a new set-up direction that was supposed to suit the slow-speed nature of the Hungaroring, but the Brazilian was unable to get any improvement from the super-soft tyres despite the improving grip levels.

“It was tough,” said Bruno after his day on-track. “Unfortunately we made a few mistakes on our car set-up. Where for everybody else the circuit was improving, for me the circuit was degrading because we had the wrong decision in car set-up.

“For tomorrow we know what we did wrong and we will improve the car, but it was a big challenge for sure. The way the car was today it didn't really like the bumps and bumps are plentiful at this track. It doesn't mean that it's bad but it just makes our life very hard.”

He said he improved by just a hundredth of a second when he put on the super-soft tyre mid-way through second practice, but other teams were improving by as much as a second. “The improvement in track conditions was big enough that it made the car react quite a lot to it, and you could see when I put on the softer tyres I only improved by a hundredth of a second whereas everybody else was improving from seven tenths to one second,” he continued.

Asked how much he expects to gain by reverting to the more well-known car set-up, Senna said: “There's at least a second that we could improve on where we are.”

Senna finished this afternoon's second practice session just over a second behind Virgin's Lucas Di Grassi, but with their rivals also likely to find time overnight with improved set-ups, Hispania are still likely to find themselves at the back of the new-team battle tomorrow.