British Formula 1 driver Lando Norris of the McLaren team accidentally broke winner Max Verstappen’s €40,000 porcelain trophy at the award ceremony of Sunday’s Hungaroring race.
After Verstappen received the trophy from Defense Minister Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky, he placed it on the podium for the customary F1 champagne spraying. Norris, who placed second, reproduced his trademark celebration of banging his bottle of champagne off the top step of the podium, only for the reverberations to cause the trophy awarded to the winner to fall and break.
Every year, the Hungaroring trophy presented to the winner is made by 197-year-old porcelain manufacturer Herend, which takes six months of manual labor to complete at an estimated cost of €40,000.
“It wasn’t on purpose. That’s my celebration, to hit the bottle, and Max put his trophy in the wrong place,” Norris said afterward while his team apologized for the incident in a tweet.
Verstappen’s Red Bull team, overjoyed by their pilot’s record-breaking 12th consecutive, win tweeted “Record broken. Trophy broken.”
Both Norris and Verstappen were seen laughing and joking about the incident while still standing on the podium as music played, showing both remained in good spirits.
On Monday morning, Herend CEO Attlia Simon said the firm will replace the trophy with a new one. He added that since Herend has a lifetime replacement policy, it keeps unfinished copies of all its products, so the replacement will take “significantly less than six months.”
