Eleven rounds into 2026, Formula 1 finally has a third winning team. Lando Norris turned pole at the Hungaroring into McLaren's first victory of the season, ending a Mercedes-Ferrari monopoly that had accounted for all ten previous races - eight to the Silver Arrows, two to the Scuderia.
It was not straightforward. Norris slipped wide at Turn 2 on the opening lap and handed the lead to team-mate Oscar Piastri, then spent the middle stint stuck behind a car he was plainly quicker than, at a circuit where following closely ruins tyres. His route back to the front came via an overcut on the second round of stops - helped considerably by Piastri losing time to a collision with the lapped Carlos Sainz.
Formula1.com quoted Norris as saying the pace was the key.
"My pace today was probably some of the best pace I've ever had," Norris said. "The car was beautiful to drive and I felt very confident, so a great race. I'm just happy to be back and see the number one again."
Speaking to Autoweek, his description of the car was rather less romantic - and more revealing about where McLaren actually is.
"I was very happy with a lot of things, the car was horrible to drive at times but quick, and I'd rather a horrible but quick car than anything else," Norris said. "I was convinced I could win the race today, and we did."
He was careful not to turn one weekend into a title claim.
"It doesn't mean if we're quick here we're going to be quick everywhere, one thing I've learned is not to have expectations of the future, we just work in the present," Norris said. "I think we can win more races, but we have good competition and there's still plenty of races I'm not confident in because the car is not to the standard it needs to be in certain areas."
Writing for Motorsport.com, Filip Cleeren was less charitable about how Norris got there, arguing the McLaren driver's impatience behind Piastri was not well received on the pit wall - he ran off the road at Turn 4 while applying pressure - and that some would read it as classic racing driver petulance rather than racecraft. Cleeren's wider point was that the second half of 2026 will be decided by which of the front-running teams has the most development left in reserve, and that McLaren's upgraded MCL40 has suddenly made that a three-way question.
Second place went to a driver who did not think he deserved it. Max Verstappen had called his Red Bull "completely broken" in qualifying, provisionally qualified sixth, and inherited fourth on the grid through penalties for Lewis Hamilton and Kimi Antonelli.
"Overall I still don't really understand how we are second but as a team we performed strongly, it's overperformance, it's a good thing considering how everything felt," Verstappen told Autoweek. "It was very tough, one of the hardest races of this year in terms of how I felt in the car, how I had to manage the balance corner-to-corner."
Antonelli, meanwhile, quietly did what a championship leader does. Demoted to seventh on the grid for a yellow-flag infringement, he ran an offset strategy and profited when both Ferraris pitted under a late virtual safety car, taking third and stretching his advantage to 50 points over the break.
"I think we maximised the result, we were a bit lucky with the VSC, other than that we did the best we could," Antonelli said.
Ferrari, who topped the timesheets on Friday and were widely fancied for the win, left with fourth and fifth - Charles Leclerc ahead of Hamilton only because of the Briton's post-race pit-lane speeding penalty.
"It's a disappointing weekend, the thing that is standing out is after the last three races there were two races we were expecting to struggle and finished first and second," Leclerc said. "And in the race where we expected to do well we finished fourth and fifth."
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*Originally published on [Formula 1 News](https://newsformula.one/article/norris-ends-mclarens-2026-wait-with-victory-in-hungary). Visit for full coverage.*