26 Jul 2026
Lando Norris took his first win of the season at the Hungarian Grand Prix after McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri, who had led from Norris off the start, was crashed out of the race by a lapped Carlos Sainz.
Lando Norris won the Hungarian Grand Prix at the Hungaroring on 26 July, his first victory of the 2026 season, beating Max Verstappen's Red Bull by 15.080 seconds. Norris started from pole but was passed at the start by McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri, who led the opening laps before pitting from the front for his second stop.
Piastri's race unravelled after that stop. Rejoining in traffic, he was hit at Turn 2 on lap 39 by the lapped car of Williams' Carlos Sainz; race control judged Sainz to have caused the collision and the stewards issued him a five-second penalty, but the damage to Piastri's McLaren ended his afternoon and dropped him out of the race entirely.
Kimi Antonelli recovered from seventh on the grid to finish third, extending his championship lead, with Charles Leclerc fourth for Ferrari. According to Forbes, Lewis Hamilton crossed the line fourth on the road but was handed a five-second penalty that dropped him to fifth in the final classification. Isack Hadjar was best of the rest in sixth for Red Bull Racing, with George Russell seventh after what Forbes described as a difficult start from which he recovered from last place.
The result left the McLaren garage with mixed emotions — a maiden 2026 win for Norris set against a lost result for Piastri that, coming from a lead position, was arguably the more costly outcome of the two for the team's constructors' championship prospects. Norris' points tally of 128 moved him up to fifth in the drivers' standings, with Charles Leclerc immediately ahead of him on 138.
It was McLaren's first win of the season, coming eleven rounds in — a long wait for a team that had dominated large parts of 2025. That it arrived alongside a zero for the sister car, in a race Piastri had led, only underlined how far removed 2026 has been from the team's previous campaign: progress at Hungary, but nothing close to the one-two finishes McLaren had grown used to a year earlier.
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