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 sessions at 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 simply misparked, after he’d made a bigger error in his unintentional block on Oscar Piastri in the other McLaren having finished his last lap. This landed him a grid drop of three places for tomorrow’s race, so he will now start fifth.

Hamilton was not alone in enduring a messy final qualifying session before F1’s summer break.

Red Bull’s Max Verstappen spun on his final run and ended up sixth. Around the resulting yellow flag, championship leader Kimi Antonelli improved his lap time, landing the young Mercedes driver a penalty as well.

Antonelli’s teammate George Russell didn’t have a much better time of it. His recent rotten luck continued as he suffered a water leak from his engine, which forced him to park up after finishing his best lap in seventh. The team has been forced into changing his engine ahead of tomorrow’s race.

Norris, the reigning world champion and the 2025 race winner here, avoided all these pitfalls to land his first pole position of the season. With it, he ended Mercedes’ perfect qualifying record this year.

“It’s been a while,” Norris said in the post-qualifying news conference. “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 Las Vegas last November, with the performance deficit of his 2026 McLaren car compared to the Mercedes and Ferrari denying him a chance of making a proper title defence.

Yet Norris has continued to perform at a high level.

Last week in Belgium, 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 finish seventh in the race, but felt that a fight for the podium at least would have been possible without that penalty, given his strong pace.

Through all three practice sessions here in Budapest, there were signs that Mercedes was not as strong as it had been through most of the season — including at Spa, through Antonelli’s impressive weekend.

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” — he 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 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 said. “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 bumps in the track overnight, after already 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 today, 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 been able to do 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 fifth, but McLaren team principal Andrea Stella attributed that to the fact he missed FP1 as 21-year-old 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 today. 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 McLaren 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 his team returning to the top of the F1 pecking order. He feels it is “far too early” to call this 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.

He also said that adding together the best parts of the laps by Hamilton and his teammate Charles Leclerc pointed to the Ferrari still having an advantage with its chassis.

Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc driving their Ferraris in qualifying for the 2026 Hungarian Grand Prix. (Ferenc Isza / AFP / Getty Images)

Qualifying on Saturday provided a reminder that Mercedes, which has already lost two races this year to its Italian rival, 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 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 (he’s now sixth after Antonelli was dropped three spots), it’ll be difficult.”

Antonelli’s penalty came after he failed to slow enough in response to the yellow flag brought out following Verstappen’s spin, dropping him to seventh on the grid. 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 tomorrow, 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 over the remainder of the season, 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.”

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — San Francisco 49ers general manager John Lynch on Saturday preempted all questions about Brandon Aiyuk, noting that the disgruntled receiver remains absent and on the reserve/left squad list.

“We’re going to focus on the players that are here,” Lynch said at the start of a press conference marking the start of training camp. “We wish him well. We wish his family well.”

Aiyuk, 28, has been on the reserve/left squad list since December after, according to the 49ers, his attendance at the team facility became sporadic and then nonexistent. That designation has left the receiver in roster limbo — he’s technically still a member of the 49ers, but he doesn’t count toward the 90-man roster or their salary cap.

To come off the reserve/left squad list and join the active roster, Aiyuk must file a request with the league, something he’s resisted to this point. Instead, he’s tried to agitate his outright release with a steady stream of social media posts that criticize everything from the 49ers to Kyle Shanahan and the players union.

A theme in those videos and posts has been the Washington Commanders. Aiyuk often is shown holding a Commanders football or ending his comments with “raise hail,” a team battle cry. Recently, he claimed to have purchased a $10 million home in Loudoun County, Virginia, near the Commanders’ practice facility.

“If I’m crazy or if I’m cappin’, tell them boys (49ers) cut me today, and I’ll sign with the Commanders tomorrow,” Aiyuk said last month.

The 49ers, meanwhile, will host the Commanders on Monday Night Football in Week 6 this season. Lynch declined to answer a question about the prospect of Aiyuk joining one of the 49ers’ upcoming opponents.

Lynch has long maintained the 49ers are looking for trade compensation for their one-time receiving leader, which the Commanders and every other NFL team have been reluctant to put forward given his 2024 multi-ligament knee injury and, presumably, his comfort in causing distractions on social media.

Asked about the suggestion that Hogh was about to have a medical, O’Neill continued: “Yes, apparently so. He will have one in the next 24 hours, I think.”

News of Hogh’s imminent arrival will ease some of the pressure on Celtic’s board and manager after Saturday’s sale of fan favourite Daizen Maeda, with the Japan forward being sold to Ipswich Town.

Meanwhile, Celtic have made just one signing this summer, albeit Colombian forward Camilo Duran has scored three goals in three warm-up games so far.

Celtic have also been strongly linked with Paderborn midfielder Mika Baur.

Asked if signing the 22-year-old German is also a possibility, O’Neill added: “That, I genuinely can’t tell you. I genuinely cannot tell you at this minute.

“I’ve been preparing for this game. I’ll see where we are tomorrow and things.

“We’ve got a few other things in the pipeline that might come to fruition, which would be great for us.”