Lando Norris ended Mercedes' stranglehold on 2026 qualifying at the Hungaroring, snatching pole for the Hungarian Grand Prix by 0.012 seconds from Lewis Hamilton on a searing Saturday in Budapest. It was the reigning champion's first pole of the season, his first since last year's Las Vegas Grand Prix, and the first works-team pole of the year that Mercedes had not taken.
Norris clocked a 1:17.207 in the closing seconds as track temperatures pushed toward 50C, the challenge being to keep Pirelli's softest C5 tyres alive through the Hungaroring's slippery final sector. He was in no mood to romanticise it.
"It wasn't my finest," Norris admitted, as reported by The Race's Samarth Kanal, unpacking how hard the lap was to execute on the newly resurfaced circuit. He credited a settled McLaren, saying the team "pretty much changed nothing" after Friday practice despite trailing Ferrari through sectors two and three, and that a shift in wind direction "limited our losses."
Hamilton had looked set to make history. A 10th career pole at a single track was on the table, and he had topped Q2. Instead he lost the front-row shoot-out by twelve-thousandths, then lost more ground in the stewards' room, collecting a three-place grid penalty for impeding Piastri in Q1. The stewards ruled he had forced the McLaren to take "avoiding action by running wide and being obliged to abort the lap." Ferrari took the blame. "It's our mistake," the team conceded, per Motorsport.com, over the missed radio call that left Hamilton unsighted.
The bigger shock was Mercedes. Championship leader Kimi Antonelli could manage only fourth on track and was then handed his own three-place penalty for failing to slow under yellow flags, dropping him to seventh on the grid. It was the team's worst qualifying of the season and the first time neither Antonelli nor George Russell had started from pole in 2026.
Antonelli pointed to a car that would not switch its tyres on. "Already in the warm-up [lap] we were going over the peak of the tyres, so already from Turn 1 you could feel the grip was not there," he said. "There was a lot of four-wheel sliding, especially in the last sector, just really no traction." He suggested Mercedes is now paying for a lack of aero development next to Ferrari and McLaren, both of which brought updated rear wings to Hungary.
Russell, seventh and needing a fresh engine for Sunday after a water leak he said was "spraying water over my tyres," insisted the raw pace is still there. "Our assessment after FP2 yesterday was we were seven tenths off in qually pace and we had the quickest race pace," he said. "So that tells you it's not a car problem, it's a tyre problem." Whether Mercedes had "struck the right balance between the tyre heating for qually versus the race," he added, would be answered in the grand prix.
Red Bull endured a scruffy hour in which both Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar spun. Verstappen, sixth, blamed a physical "degradation" of his RB22 and its aero load, and batted away any suggestion of panic. "Desperate? I'm already past that stage," he told reporters, per Motorsport.com. The fastest Red Bull was more than half a second off in Q3, a familiar deficit across the weekend.
One feel-good story emerged further back. Aston Martin, running a heavily revised upgrade package, reached Q2 for the first time this season, Fernando Alonso hauling the AMR26 to 16th. The two-time champion framed it as a turning point: the team is no longer chasing something it "doesn't know," he said, "because we know exactly what we are looking for."
With Norris on pole, Leclerc promoted to the front row and both Hamilton and Antonelli buried by penalties, Sunday's race shapes up as the most open Mercedes has faced all year.
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*Originally published on [NewsFormula One](https://newsformula.one/article/norris-pips-hamilton-to-hungary-pole-as-mercedes-falters). Visit for full coverage.*