The McLaren driver was particularly strong in the final free practice session in Hungary, with Norris running fastest and his team-mate Piastri not far behind, just under 0.044 seconds behind, both ahead of Verstappen, who ran third fastest.
The third practice took place in cloudy weather, and the ambient temperature was much cooler than on Friday, and the track temperature was 20°C lower than during the first session. For the first one-third of the time, apart from the initial swagger, only two Red Bull drivers were running on hard tyres. Pérez and Verstappen were the fastest.
Then, with the exception of the Aston Martin Racing team's two drivers on medium tyres, the rest of the drivers went straight to the soft tyres, with Norris setting the standard for the top spot, while the Mercedes drivers were better than the previous day in cooler conditions, and Russell went on to take out the McLaren driver for first place.
Then, in the last 20 minutes, before the drivers started another round of qualifying simulations, they mostly ran long distances on soft tyres. Russell started the final one-third of the third practice by about 0.3 seconds above the top of the leaderboard, and his teammate Hamilton also rushed to second.
However, Norris and Piastri then came on new soft tyres, with the former running the fastest time of the race at 1:16.098 to take the top spot, followed by the latter by just 0.044 seconds. Verstappen brushed the Mercedes to third on his first attempt on soft tyres, and then he challenged the McLaren driver's lap time again, only to give up after braking too late at Turn 1 and locking the tyre, trailing Norris by as many as 0.281 seconds.
Russell finished fourth, while team-mate Hamilton, who was about 0.2 seconds behind him, was later pushed into tenth by Ferrari driver Sainz, Red Bull Racing's Ricciardo, Williams driver Albon, Haas' Hulkenberg and Tsunoda Yuki.