Mercedes questions true reason behind McLaren’s Hungarian GP breakthrough
Was McLaren's performance in Hungary down to upgrades alone? Mercedes suspect the driver played a big part...
Mercedes believes there was more to McLaren’s step forward in competitiveness in Hungary than the upgrades introduced to the MCL40 for the Budapest weekend.
Lando Norris took a commanding victory in Budapest, his first as the reigning world champion, with McLaren having controlled the race throughout.
Mercedes believes Lando Norris and McLaren’s Hungary pace was about more than upgrades
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With Norris having taken pole position ahead of Kimi Antonelli by just 0.012 seconds, the Mercedes challenge for victory was compromised by the Italian being given a three-place grid penalty for failing to slow sufficiently for a late yellow flag.
With the Mercedes drivers starting from sixth and seventh, and George Russell immediately falling out of contention due to a technical issue that forced his car into anti-stall, the race itself was broadly an intra-McLaren affair as Oscar Piastri took the lead ahead of Norris at the start.
With Max Verstappen slowing the Ferraris behind him, the Piastri vs. Norris battle was decided in the British driver’s favour after the Australian was badly blocked by a lapped Carlos Sainz midway through the race.
But even without this incident, it was clear Norris had plenty of pace in hand over his teammate, and it seemed to be a question of when, not if, he would take the lead ahead of Piastri, although this wouldn’t have been an easy quest given Piastri’s track position.
Norris went on to streak clear at the front, with Piastri retiring with a gearbox issue. Despite the dominance of the result, it was McLaren and Norris’ first win of 2026 in a season in which Mercedes has claimed the lion’s share of victories, with Ferrari the only interlopers up until Budapest.
The victory came on a weekend McLaren introduced some updates to the MCL40, including a revised floor body design, rear wing endplate and rear corner winglets, but Mercedes’ Simone Resta said he suspects there was more than just the updates that can explain the performance – and that it may have largely been down to Norris himself.
“The update package was certainly significant, and it must have contributed to their performance,” Resta said on the Nu Silver Arrows radio show.
“At the same time, if you look at the gap between their two cars, there was clearly more to it than the upgrade alone.
“Throughout the year we’ve seen McLaren perform very strongly, with the balance of performance between their two drivers varying from race to race.
“We’ve also seen strong performances from Lando several times this season.
“Budapest may simply have been one of those weekends where he found himself in a particularly good place with the car, the setup and tyre management. I think it was probably a combination of both factors.”
But while Mercedes may think that a convergence of a number of factors contributed to Norris’ dominance, McLaren boss Andrea Stella pointed to the upgrades as being the main proponent for the improvement.
“I think the improvement, from a competitiveness point of view, can be entirely ascribed to the upgrades that we took here,” he told media including PlanetF1.com following the race.
“We were thinking that this lap time step would not necessarily have been enough to be in pole position at the Hungaroring, and definitely we would not have thought that there would be enough to have such a strong pace in the race.
“Honestly, I still believe that if we want to be in a position to fight for victories consistently in the future, we need to keep our focus on delivering more upgrades. That is the plan.”
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Stella has been open about the areas McLaren has needed to improve, previously pointing to how the team had been some months behind on aero development relative to the likes of Mercedes, but had high hopes its proven track record at introducing efficient upgrades could help close the gap – a task that seemed to be broadly successful with the Hungary roll-out.
“We are not naive,” Stella said of the development war.
“We know that this will be the plan for all the teams. So I think, like it’s always been in this 2026 season, it’s a matter of a race of upgrades, and the good news is that McLaren is now back in this race of upgrades while fighting for the lead.
“But I expect that the car that will be the best car at the end of the season will keep adding tenths of a second in the next 11 races, probably as much as half a second. So definitely a lot of work ahead of everyone, not only McLaren.”
Another area that has been a weakness for McLaren so far this year has been in the area of power unit exploitation, with the change in regulations naturally giving factory teams an advantage in terms of understanding how best to optimise how best to use a power unit’s potential.
As a customer team, McLaren may be given the exact same equipment and ancillaries as Mercedes from its High-Performance Powertrains supply, but doesn’t necessarily have to be proactively told how best to use it. In Hungary, Stella felt a significant step forward had been made in this area.
“There’s been really good work following some of the conversation around exploitation of the power unit,” he said.
“I think here at the Hungaroring is the event in which McLaren and HPP have done the best job of squeezing every single millisecond out of the power unit.
“The fact that yesterday we were on pole position by 12 milliseconds, definitely, there’s a lot that can be found in the power unit. So thank you to HPP.”
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