BUDAPEST, Hungary — It’s been a habit for Lewis Hamilton to park a Formula 1 car up behind the first place marker board after qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix.Hamilton has been on pole nine times at the Hungaroring, a record for a driver at a single circuit. It’s understandable that he’d stop his car in the spot reserved for first place, particularly after setting the pace early in the final stage of qualifying on Saturday.Yet it was a mistake this time. Pole for the 2026 Hungarian GP actually belonged to McLaren’s Lando Norris, who’d pipped Hamilton to the top spot by 0.012-seconds with his final lap.Hamilton later explained he’d misparked, after he’d made a bigger error in his unintentional block on Oscar Piastri in the other McLaren after finishing his last lap. This landed him a grid drop of three places for tomorrow’s race and he will now start fifth.Hamilton was not alone in enduring a messy final qualifying before F1’s summer break. Max Verstappen spun his Red Bull car on his final run and ended up sixth. Around the resulting yellow flag, championship leader Kimi Antonelli improved his lap time, landing the Mercedes driver a penalty as well.Antonelli’s Mercedes teammate, George Russell, didn’t have a much better time. His recent rotten luck continued as he suffered a water leak on his engine, which forced him to park up after finishing his best lap in seventh place. Mercedes has been forced into changing Russell’s engine ahead of Sunday’s race.Yet Norris, the reigning world champion and the 2025 race winner in Hungary, avoided all these pitfalls to land his first pole position of the season. With it, he ended Mercedes’ perfect qualifying record so far this year.“It’s been a while,” Norris said in the post-qualifying news conference in Budapest. “I felt confident all weekend. It’s nice to be able to turn it into something.”Norris hasn’t started a race from first place since last year’s Las Vegas GP, with the performance deficit of his 2026 McLaren car compared to the Mercedes and Ferrari cars denying him a chance of a proper title defence.Yet Norris has continued to perform at a high level. Last week at Spa, he looked like one of the quickest drivers all weekend before a grid penalty for taking additional engine parts dropped him from third to 12th on the grid.He could only recover to seventh in the race, but felt that a fight for the podium at least was possible without the penalty, given his strong pace.Through all three practice sessions in Budapest, there were signs that Mercedes was not as strong as had been through most of the season so far — including at Spa through Antonelli’s impressive weekend in Belgium.This opened the door for Ferrari and McLaren to potentially mount a challenge in qualifying.McLaren driver Lando Norris in action during qualifying for the 2026 Hungarian Grand Prix. (Clive Mason/Getty Images)But Saturday in Hungary belonged to Norris alone. He topped final practice and then led the first two stages of qualifying. Had it not been for a sideways moment at the final corner on his first Q3 lap — “I was drifting, basically” — Norris would likely have been on provisional pole too, ahead of Hamilton.The big challenge for Norris on his final run was the track’s asphalt. Several areas of the Hungaroring’s surface were relaid before this year’s race, only for drivers to struggle with the inconsistent grip levels. According to Norris, it was also “pretty broken up in places.” It hardly made for a perfect pole lap.“(It was) just difficult to put a lap together here, that’s for sure,” Norris explained. “With the new asphalt, it being grippy in places and not grippy in others, sometimes it feels like a bit of a lottery in certain corners.”The FIA is set to conduct further work on track bumps overnight after dealing with issues following practice. This follows the track at the Monaco GP in June breaking up during the race.But when it mattered in Q3, Norris was able to push a little bit harder and find snippets of extra time, as his confidence grew with what grip there was on offer. Had he had time for a third run, Norris was confident he could’ve found another chunk.McLaren came into the Hungary weekend armed with car updates, including a new floor, adjusted rear wing endplates and some aerodynamic tweaks around the front and rear corners.Its understandable focus on last year’s championship battle, ultimately justified by Norris’ coronation, had delayed its 2026 car development plans compared to Mercedes, leaving it playing catch-up through the first half of the 2026 season.The upgrades played a part in helping Norris snap Mercedes’ pole streak on Saturday.Piastri was a step behind his teammate, qualifying down in fifth place, but McLaren team principal Andrea Stella attributed that to the fact Piastri missed FP1 as reserve driver Leonardo Fornaroli was given a rookie practice outing, as teams are required to arrange four times across a season, as well as Piastri only getting the updated parts fitted to his car on Saturday.Teams often place an upgrade on one car initially to compare data with the old parts at the same track.The first impressions for McLaren have been positive. Especially on a track like the Hungaroring, where chassis strength is key as short straights make engine performance less decisive, this was another good endorsement of the team’s development capabilities. These have been a strong suit for the team in recent years, when it comes to making a car faster during a season.Stella didn’t wish to exaggerate the impact of the result as being any indication of McLaren returning to the top of the F1 pecking order., He said it was “far too early” to call it a turning point.“The fact is the upgrades delivered as we intended, but I think the pole position is a little bit of an overachievement, thanks to execution and maximising the potential that was available,” he said.Stella said that adding together the best parts of Hamilton and his teammate Charles Leclerc’s laps for Ferrari pointed to the Italian team still having an advantage with its chassis.Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc driving their Ferrari cars during qualifying for the 2026 Hungarian Grand Prix. (FERENC ISZA / AFP / Getty Images)Qualifying provided a reminder that Mercedes, which has already lost two races this year to Ferrari, can see its advantage fluctuate or even disappear depending on certain factors. This time around it was the tire preparation.“We lost a little bit ourselves in Q2,” said Antonelli, after a rare quiet qualifying session this year where he never looked a serious pole threat, having also missed FP1 on Friday.“We were so out of the window with tires. That put us a little bit on the back foot. Having to make such a huge step in Q3 is never ideal. The car changed quite a bit, and it was not easy to extract the maximum out of it.”Russell faced a similar problem as he languished further down the order, yet he did take some comfort from how the Mercedes car had performed over the long runs in second practice on Friday, which suggests 2026’s leading team may be stronger in Sunday’s race.“Our assessment after FP2 was we were seven-tenths (of a second) off in qualifying pace, and the quickest in race pace,” Russell said. “So that tells you it’s not a car problem, it’s a tire problem. I guess we’ll answer the question tomorrow — if we’ve struck the right balance between the tire heating for qualifying versus the race.“But starting in P7 (sixth after Antonelli’s penalty), it’ll be difficult.”Antonelli’s penalty came after he failed to slow enough in response to the yellow flag brought out in response to Verstappen’s spin, dropping him to seventh on the grid behind Russell. Clawing back from there will be tough for Mercedes, especially at a track where overtaking is difficult as the layout is narrow and technical.But, even without considering what it may achieve starting from the front in Budapest on Sunday, Stella said that McLaren would need to find another half a second in performance for it to be a consistent challenger for race wins over the rest of this year.But while pole in Hungary may have been an overachievement, the result on Saturday has shown there is still plenty for the team to fight for this year, especially with Norris driving as well as he has of late.“We’ve been working hard,” said Norris. “We know we’ve been on the back foot, but we’re making progress, and today certainly shows that.”