McLaren has a front-row lock for Sunday’s race.
BUDAPEST, Hungary—It took an accident with two minutes to go in final Saturday qualifying, along with light rain showers, to give Lando Norris his second pole position of the season and his third of his career for Sunday’s Hungarian Grand Prix. McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri finished second, while Red Bull’s Max Verstappen was third. It is the first time in 12 years that the Woking-based team locked the front row.
The Briton clocked his winning time right in the middle of the session with a 1:15:227, which only his teammate could improve. But with that time coming close to the end, RB’s Yuki Tsunoda crashed his car into the barriers, which caused a red flag for the second time of the day. However, the barriers were not harmed, and qualifying in its final stage resumed. But nobody came close to Norris’s best time.
“Every qualifying is important, and every race is important,” Norris said afterward. “We have done the best we could in every race. We have shown great pace and opportunities. I know we have missed out on some, and we don’t need to go back into all that stuff.”
Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc took fourth and sixth places, with Mercedes Lewis Hamilton in fifth. Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll finished seventh and eighth. RB’s Daniel Ricciardo was the only driver to take a flying lap at the end of the final session. He took ninth ahead of Tsunoda, who, despite his accident, finished tenth.
Verstappen’s teammate Sergio Perez continued his bad luck on Saturday by hitting a patch of water and sliding into the barriers at turn eight, bringing out the first red flag period, which lasted 15 minutes. Besides Perez, the big shocker of the day was Mercedes George Russell, who did not have enough fuel to take a flying lap and was out early in qualifying.
The two Alpine drivers, Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly, had their team misjudge the increasing rainy conditions. The precipitation looked like it would worsen, but it did not, and both drivers came out too late to improve their times.
Racing will begin on ESPN at 10:00 AM in the Eastern time zone.
