McLaren driver Lando Norris claimed his first win of the F1 2026 season at the Hungarian Grand Prix in Budapest.
The reigning world champion converted pole position into victory with Max Verstappen second for Red Bull and Kimi Antonelli third for Mercedes. Here are our conclusions from the Hungaroring…
This is what Lando Norris is now capable of as world champion
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Lando Norris has been in this sort of situation before as the classier McLaren driver for much of the season, only to watch his teammate take the glory of victory.
He managed to smile through the pain when Daniel Ricciardo won at Monza in 2021, impressively recognising that the collective achievement of McLaren ending its nine-year wait for a win superseded his own disappointment.
Lando was considerably less pleased a couple of years later when Oscar Piastri came along and pipped him to a first win – literally any win would have sufficed at that stage of his career – in the sprint race in Qatar.
It appeared to be happening all over again in the first phase of the race in Hungary as we were briefly transported back to 2025.
Not the joyous, relieved, champagne-spraying end of 2025, but the middle part.
The part when for several months Piastri managed to make Norris look so unsure of himself.
Most will recognise the Lando of the opening half of the race: running wide under pressure at Turn 2 to gift the lead to Piastri; going off at Turn 4 in self-pity at one stage; sounding like he was already giving up as he grumbled something over team radio about being stuck in Oscar’s dirty air.
Lewis Hamilton coined a phrase following his win in Barcelona last month about “remembering who I am.”
As the race developed in Hungary, it seemed Norris did not merely remember who he is.
He remembered instead that the Lando of old – the flaky Lando riddled with self-doubt and uncertainty – is no more.
The moment he regained his composure was the moment he began driving like the world champion he now is.
From that point, calmer and with the pace now oozing from him, Piastri was relatively easy meat.
As noted in PlanetF1.com’s conclusions from Belgium, there has been some regret in 2026 that Norris has been denied the full Year After The Year experience.
With McLaren taking a step back under the new rules, he has largely been prevented from building on his successful 2025 despite his belief that he is performing at a higher level than last season.
It is invariably the case that a driver becomes better, stronger, more complete in the afterglow of winning a maiden championship.
More confident. More relaxed. More self-assured.
Circumstances had stopped him from demonstrating the full extent of his personal growth until now.
But these are the irresistible heights Lando Norris is now capable of scaling as a world champion.
More, please.
Oscar Piastri looks destined to be the nearly man at McLaren
There was a time when many felt that Oscar Piastri had even greater potential than Lando Norris.
A famous clip from Drive to Survive a couple of years ago shows Christian Horner being asked which of the two McLaren drivers he would sign for Red Bull if given the chance.
A tough choice, you might think. But Horner did not hesitate: “Oscar Piastri.”
For all sorts of reasons, that feels like a very long time ago now.
The state of play at McLaren was always bound to go one of two ways in the aftermath of 2025.
Either Lando was going to consider it job done after achieving his lifetime ambition, opening the door for Oscar to take the baton.
Or Norris was going to find himself elevated to a whole new level of performance, leaving Piastri behind.
Piastri remains an impressive talent, but has lost his way recently.
Too often in 2026 you have been left to wonder how he managed to push Norris quite so hard for so much of last season.
Now in their fourth season as teammates, just as he might have fancied finally overhauling Lando as team leader, Piastri looks more like Norris’s wingman than at any stage since he joined the team in 2023.
It was said that no truly elite driver throws away the 34-point lead Piastri held over Norris after his most recent victory at Zandvoort 11 months ago.
Unlike his teammate, there has been precious little personal development in the year since.
His struggles in low-grip conditions – the famous excuse for his disappearing acts in Austin and Mexico as the 2025 title race reached its climax – were once again exposed in Barcelona recently as he finished 35 seconds behind Norris.
As noted after that race, where George Russell made similar complaints, any driver who admits he struggles in low grip is inadvertently letting slip that he is a limited and less versatile driver than his peers.
The answer – the reason why Norris and Kimi Antonelli thrive in conditions where Piastri and Russell are almost defenceless – is almost always in how much energy each driver puts through the tyres.
Meanwhile, in Hungary, Andrea Stella, the McLaren team principal, pointed to the relative lack of downforce of the 2026 cars as a factor behind Piastri’s patchy performances this season.
Against the backdrop of the recent speculation about his place at McLaren, it was curious that in the heat of the moment Piastri turned his frustration on the team as the race started to run away from him on Sunday.
The thought occurred: might the decision by Mark Webber, Piastri’s manager, to take a step back from trackside duties in 2026 have been more significant than it first appeared?
For all that they might protest otherwise, was that development symptomatic of a widening gap between McLaren and the Piastri camp? Of a team and driver slowly falling out of love with each other?
The easy thing to do would be to point fingers at McLaren for pitting him into traffic (Piastri himself later clarified that the strategy on his side of the garage was “fine” as they worked to see off the threat of Lewis Hamilton).
Of greater concern should be why he ultimately could not live with Norris’s pace in Hungary, almost certainly a function of Oscar’s technique loading up the rear of the car more heavily.
That failure to shake Lando off, despite the advantage of clear air, is where the race was really lost.
That – where am I falling short? What can I do to get better? – is where the minds of the great drivers, those committed to self-improvement and refining their technique, instinctively go.
There was a touch of the Webbers in the unfortunate way Piastri’s race ended on Sunday.
The collision with Carlos Sainz – who, on the evidence of a messy weekend from start to finish, is now allowing the deep frustration of Williams’ situation to seep into his driving – was followed by a gearbox problem.
It always seemed to be Webber who got the rough end of the deal at Red Bull, too, as he also struggled to keep up with a teammate who entered a different stratosphere after sealing his first world championship.
The final years of Webber’s career at Red Bull alongside Sebastian Vettel were spent as the nearly man.
With great regret, it increasingly seems that is the limit of Piastri’s ambitions at McLaren too.
Red Bull has relied far too heavily on Max Verstappen for far too long
Sometimes you just know.
Sometimes you can tell instinctively when something – be it a relationship or a job – is reaching its natural conclusion.
The colour has gone. The people have changed. That certain something that once made it so special has drained away.
In an F1 context, Lewis Hamilton’s retirement from the Singapore Grand Prix of 2012 is often held up as a classic case.
Turning to glance at his stricken car after retiring from the lead, it is widely believed that was the moment Hamilton finally accepted that McLaren, for all they had done for each other, could no longer satisfy his needs.
His move to Mercedes for the 2013 season was made official five days later.
Max Verstappen is not really the sentimental type. Not really one for backward glances.
But as he stomped through the gravel away from his Red Bull, that same feeling – that this had finally reached the point of no return – was hanging in the air following his retirement at the British Grand Prix earlier this month.
Whenever the subject of Verstappen’s future crops up these days, an old image does the rounds on social media.
It portrays Verstappen and his Red Bull colleagues in the midst of yet another celebration after yet another victory.
Except every individual of note to have left the team over recent years has been greyed out.
Christian Horner? Gone. Adrian Newey? Gone. Helmut Marko? Gone. Jonathan Wheatley? Gone.
GianPiero Lambiase? Going. Paul Monaghan? Potentially on his way out too.
This, almost without exception in sport, is how eras end and empires fall.
Yet astonishingly it is Max, the one who it always seemed would not hesitate to leave the moment Red Bull’s usefulness to him expired, who is the last man standing.
If there was hope last year that taking Horner out of the equation would lead to a healthier and happier environment, Red Bull could not have been more mistaken.
See the tale of Ole Schack, Verstappen’s front-end mechanic, who had been with Red Bull since the start in 2005 but only decided to leave earlier this year, citing a change to the atmosphere under the new regime in his decision to move on.
This, it appears, is a team whose troubles go beyond the racetrack with a restless, unhappy workforce.
Unlike previous years, there is a clear route out for Verstappen in 2026.
As of Sunday afternoon, his famous exit clause, which allows him to leave Red Bull if he is lower than second in the drivers’ standings at the time of the summer break, has come into play for the first time.
A move to McLaren, a team with more potential than Red Bull in the short term, is presumably waiting to be done if and when he says the word.
If Verstappen had been leaning towards staying with what he has come to regard as his “second family” for 2027, the performance of the upgraded McLaren at the Hungarian Grand Prix might result in a rethink.
If he can do this with a “degrading” Red Bull, as he put it after qualifying on Saturday, what exactly could he achieve in that McLaren?
Verstappen equalled his own best result of 2026 in Budapest, of course, a potent mix of talent and the sheer brute force of his spirit dragging the Red Bull to second place.
His overtake on Hamilton at Turn 1 was yet another reminder that he simply operates at a different level to the rest.
Yet it is revealing that even on the better days this season, his comments both in and out of the car – “how the f**k we got second today is unbelievable,” he said over team radio at the chequered flag – are still littered with complaints about the fundamental limitations of his machinery.
Only Verstappen’s genius, it seems, is stopping Red Bull from collapsing like a boneless chicken.
When it emerged that Verstappen would stay with Red Bull a year ago, this column predicted that Max, already unlikely to win the 2025 title, could also kiss goodbye to the 2026 championship too.
Here’s another: if he stays this time, he will be wasting another year of his career.
The hard truth? Red Bull has relied far too heavily on Verstappen for far too long.
There comes a point where loyalty crosses into the territory of career stagnation.
Sometimes you just know.
Even Max must draw the line somewhere.
No, of course Adrian Newey hasn’t lost his touch
Wait, so that’s it?
Sixteenth on the grid? Two-and-a-half seconds off the fastest time in Q2? Only one lap down this weekend instead of two?
Given the sheer amount of hype surrounding Aston Martin’s B-spec car, you might have been forgiven for expecting more in Hungary.
Yet it is a measure of how disastrously low the starting point was in 2026 that the Budapest upgrade – enough to leave Cadillac behind, see off Williams and squeeze past a Haas for a place in the second stage of qualifying – is considered a resounding success.
It was a highly encouraging step for Aston Martin, no doubt: the first glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.
But it was also a daunting reminder of how much road there is still left to travel before the team comes even remotely close to reaching its potential.
In keeping with the atmosphere of the modern age, hyperbole has run like a seam through the discourse of this season.
Lewis Hamilton, for instance, was instantly considered back to his best by some after claiming his first podium for Ferrari in China.
Those same people had him down as a serious title contender after a first win in two years in Barcelona last month.
More recently, many rushed to declare that George Russell had rediscovered his form following his victory in Austria… only for subsequent rounds to strongly suggest otherwise.
One of the more ludicrous (and, frankly, insulting) theories to take hold in 2026 has been the suggestion that, since swapping Red Bull blue for Aston Martin green, Adrian Newey has somehow lost his touch.
You know? Adrian Newey? The same guy who produced the most dominant car in F1 history as recently as three years ago? Yep. That one.
The reality, as ever, is far more nuanced.
With Aston Martin’s preparation for this season a complete mess – for starters, the team did not put a model of the 2026 car in the wind tunnel until April last year, four months after the rest – Newey has been taking the necessary steps to ensure that it never finds itself in this position again.
Much like the early years at Red Bull, he is orchestrating a complete rethink of the way Aston Martin does things, challenging previous methods and providing a clearer direction.
Out with the old and in with the Newey, in other words.
Fernando Alonso alluded to it a little in Thursday’s press conference in Budapest, telling PlanetF1.com and other media outlets that Newey is noticeably more receptive to driver feedback than the previous technical leadership.
The difference compared to the 2006-08 Red Bull era is that the standard is now higher and more professional across the pit lane, meaning a team in transition is these days far more likely to find itself exposed on the leaderboard.
The results may still be modest and it will never seem quite right to hear a driver of Alonso’s calibre speak glowingly of 16th place on the grid.
PF1 revealed on Thursday in Hungary that Honda’s new PU will run for the first time in a filming day in Budapest
Yet the really exciting thing about the Hungary upgrade is what it represents for Aston Martin.
After the false start of the first half of 2026, this is the first real glimpse of a team now actively being shaped in Newey’s image.
It has never been more obvious that it will take time – potentially years – for Aston Martin to reach the front.
But it feels equally likely that, as long as Adrian’s steady hands are moulding the team around him, Aston will get there in the end.
Kimi Antonelli’s bad days are better than George Russell’s
It is often said that world championships are won on the bad days, not the good.
Race victories build the platform, but it is how effectively drivers minimise the losses that ultimately decides the destination of the title.
With six victories compared to George Russell’s two, Kimi Antonelli has had a higher ceiling so far in 2026.
And George’s floor just happens to be lower too, allowing Kimi to extend his points advantage even on a tricky weekend for Mercedes in Hungary.
Conclusions recap: How the F1 2026 season has unfolded
Belgian GP conclusions: Spa sacrilege, Russell rattled, Verstappen temptation
British GP conclusions: Leclerc’s Hamilton answer, no Russell fear, in defence of FIA
His understated drive will struggle to generate much attention after this race.
Not when the focus will be on the contrasting fortunes of the McLaren drivers, the Max Verstappen situation and Ferrari and the perpetually penalised Lewis Hamilton conspiring to throw away a golden opportunity.
Yet there is something to be said for Antonelli overcoming his post-qualifying penalty and turning seventh on the grid into third, stretching 30 laps out of a set of hard tyres.
It is no exaggeration to suggest that this drive – gritty and clinical – was more impressive even than some of his victories in 2026.
Compare and contrast with Russell, whose struggles are becoming all too predictable.
It was bad enough that a poor start left him 18th at the end of the opening lap without the news that a crack to his engine, caused by him running over the kerb at Turn 4 on his final Q3 lap on Saturday, could put him in the way of a grid penalty in the second half of the season.
To repeat the point from Spa: there are certain moments in each season that signal clearly where the wind is blowing.
Here, as Antonelli made another small but significant step towards a maiden title, was another.
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