The 2026 Hungarian Grand Prix: 2025, Rewritten

For much of the 2026 Hungarian Grand Prix, it felt as though Formula One had a massive rewind. Two McLarens fought at the front. Oscar Piastri snatched the lead from Lando Norris on the opening lap. Norris insisted over the radio that he was faster. Max Verstappen hovered behind them, waiting for an opportunity to interfere. Ferrari, in the midst of all this, appeared fast enough to influence everyone else’s strategy, even if it could not sustain the threat.

It was 2025 all over again… Just not quite the version we remembered.

The Hungaroring always had a habit of producing strange races, and the final Grand Prix before the summer break delivered one that felt like a time capsule from an alternate season. The events, tensions, and players were familiar, but their places within the story had subtly changed. 

Norris, now the reigning World Champion, started from pole but lost the lead when Piastri completed a cutback at Turn 2. What followed looked like the return of McLaren’s old dilemma: two drivers with the pace to win and a team reluctant to become the deciding voice between them. Norris argued that he was “miles faster,” but McLaren declined to move Piastri aside; this time he didn’t need them to. 

When Piastri made his second stop, Norris remained on track and produced the pace required to reverse their order. His speed in clear air was enough to create a net pit-stop advantage before contact between Piastri and Carlos Sainz further disrupted the Australian’s race. Piastri’s eventual gearbox failure removed any possibility of a final confrontation, but Norris had already changed the direction of the Grand Prix himself. That was the first variation on the familiar script. The McLaren conflict remained, but Norris was no longer waiting for the team to resolve it for him.

Behind them, Verstappen occupied another recognizable role. His Red Bull was visibly uncomfortable, and his radio complaints suggested a car he was surviving rather than commanding. Still, when Piastri retired and the Virtual Safety Car arrived, Verstappen was there to inherit second place. Even in a race in which Red Bull did not appear to possess winning pace, he remained close enough to benefit when the order fractured.

Then there was Ferrari: the most intriguing deviation from the 2025 illusion. The Scuderia’s race ultimately ended with Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton in fourth and fifth, yet the opening stages suggested that both McLaren and Red Bull viewed the red cars as an immediate strategic danger. Leclerc and Hamilton started aggressively on soft tires while the McLarens and Verstappen chose mediums. Hamilton spent the early laps pursuing Verstappen, while Leclerc later pushed Ferrari to alter its strategy rather than remain trapped behind his teammate. 

The result did not reflect the level of attention Ferrari initially commanded. As the race developed, the hard tires exposed the limits of its pace. The team that appeared to be the threat everyone was reacting to became the team reacting to its own deterioration. Ferrari was treated like the car to beat before the Grand Prix revealed that it could not remain that car until the finish.

Even the final podium felt like a distorted reflection of another season. Norris won. Verstappen survived his way into second. Kimi Antonelli quietly emerged in third after having had a more patient race than some of his recent performances.

Hungary was not proof that Formula One had returned to 2025, but it was evidence of how much had changed since December’s Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. The same rivalries resurfaced. The same orange cars dictated the race. Verstappen remained close enough to profit, and Ferrari once again offered flashes of promise complicated by execution and tire performance…. But Norris was now the champion rather than the challenger, Ferrari important enough to shape the strategies around it, and the familiar McLaren battle ended not with a controversial instruction from the pit wall, but with Norris taking control of the race himself.

The Hungarian Grand Prix, simply put, was 2025 preserved in amber, cracked open, rearranged and given a different ending.