Lando Norris is looking at the 2026 Formula 1 season with a mixture of pride and frustration. Pride, because McLaren have dragged themselves back into the fight after a bruising start. Frustration, because in his mind, this team should already be clear of the pack.
Twelve races in, the numbers tell a stark story. McLaren, double champions in 2025, sit only third in the constructors’ standings on 263 points. Mercedes lead on 425, Ferrari follow on 338. In the drivers’ table, Norris is fourth with 159 points, staring up at Andrea Kimi Antonelli on 242, and the Mercedes pairing of George Russell and Lewis Hamilton, locked together on 183.
For a team that swept both titles last year, that feels like underperformance. Norris doesn’t shy away from it.
“We should be further ahead,” he told the media. No dressing it up. No excuses.
A season that stumbled out of the blocks
McLaren’s 2026 campaign didn’t just start slowly. It barely started at all.
Across the opening two races, they suffered three separate Did Not Starts. Before the championship had even settled into rhythm, they were already playing catch-up. Three more retirements followed, compounding the damage and handing Mercedes and Ferrari a head start that no title contender can afford.
Those early failures shredded what should have been a solid platform. Points vanished before Norris and his team-mate could even see a green light. By the time reliability returned, the standings had already taken shape without them.
The response, though, has been fierce. McLaren have hit back with victories in the last two races, finally converting their underlying pace into results. The car is quick, the development is aggressive, and the mood has shifted from damage limitation to attack.
Still, Norris knows the maths. The deficit remains heavy.
“But I’m still 80 points behind, so I wouldn’t say it’s that close,” he admitted. The title fight is not out of reach, but it is no longer on his terms.
Paying the price for 2025
Norris is clear about the root cause. McLaren’s dominance in 2025 came at a cost.
He points out that the team poured enormous effort into last season’s car, stretching resources and delaying their full focus on the new 2026 regulations. In his view, the slow start was almost baked in.
“It was inevitable that we were not going to start on the pace this season,” he reflected. McLaren knew they would turn up slightly behind, and the early mechanical chaos only deepened that gap.
Yet within that context, Norris sees something impressive. From where they were at the beginning of the year, and given how heavily 2025 drained their attention, he believes McLaren have done “the best job” of any top team in clawing their way back.
“For us to catch up, we’ve out-developed them,” he said. On a track like the one they’ve just conquered, he estimates almost a second of lap time has come purely from McLaren’s development push relative to their rivals. “That’s pretty insane,” he added, and it’s hard to argue.
The car that stumbled in March is not the car that’s winning in late summer.
A new era, but a tighter field
Norris’s assessment stretches beyond McLaren’s own garage. He sees a 2026 grid that, under fresh regulations, is far more compact than previous rule changes have produced.
He only has to look back a decade. In 2014, Mercedes blew the field away at the dawn of the hybrid era, their advantage so vast it took years for anyone to mount a serious challenge. When the chassis rules shifted again, Red Bull seized control and opened up their own gap at the front.
This time, it feels different. Mercedes started the season strongly, Ferrari surged and have stayed “very, very strong”, as Norris put it. Red Bull have flickered in and out of contention, shining at times and fading at others. McLaren, late to the party, are now right in the mix.
Four teams, all within striking distance. No runaway leader. No single dominant force.
“I think it’s close. It’s relatively close for a new regulation, that’s for sure. It’s definitely closer than what previous years have been with new regulations,” Norris said.
The irony is clear. The field has closed up just as McLaren, the reigning benchmark, stumbled out of the gate. The margins are smaller, the room for error almost non-existent, and those three DNFs at the start of the year now loom even larger.
Yet the story is far from finished. McLaren have already shown they can out-develop the opposition. The car is moving forward, Norris is driving with conviction, and the gap, while significant, is not insurmountable.
If this is what they can do from behind, what happens if they finally get a clean run?
