Norris still confident the McLaren can become the best F1 car of 2026

Lando Norris says McLaren is pushing hard to catch Mercedes and feels its 2026 car has “a lot of potential” ahead of this weekend’s Japanese Grand Prix.

McLaren has suffered a disastrous start to the new season, with Oscar Piastri crashing on his way to the grid in Australia and both cars failing to start in China due to separate issues related to the Mercedes power unit. Despite that, the team is still third in the constructors’ championship, and Norris says the performance level is a strong initial point to develop from.

“The car has a lot of potential,” Norris said. "We’re certainly not where we wanted to be, but I think… The real question you probably ask is would I rather be here and have won [the title] last year, or would I rather have a slightly better car now and not have won last year, and I think you know what my answer would be. So, you can’t have the best of everything.

“As a team we certainly are not where we want to be and where we desire to be, but I think we all know within the team what we can achieve. And now is just as good a time as ever to prove exactly what we can do as a team – against Ferrari, against Mercedes, who are performing very well. But I know all the boys and the girls back in the factory are working very hard and there’s good progress happening.

“It takes time to improve on some things and it’s not like we’re bad. We’re still third-best team at the minute, but we certainly enjoy being first a lot more than third. So, time will tell. We’ve got some things in the pipeline and like I said everyone’s working hard, so we’re ambitious to get back to the top.”

As back-to-back constructors’ champions, Norris retains the belief that McLaren can overhaul Mercedes through car development this year and still fight for titles.

“I can’t remember how many points we were behind in 2024 from Mercedes and Red Bull, Ferrari, but I think we were over 150 points or something behind and we still managed to come back and win the constructors’. I don’t know how far we are behind now – it’s already quite a bit – but I think we’re not necessarily thinking of that just yet.

“What we are thinking of is getting on the podium first of all, and then just returning to winning races. The points then take care of themselves and we’ll see what we can claw back.

“I think we’re confident as a team and we believe in ourselves – we’ve won the last two championships and we won the drivers’ last year because we could build the best car on the grid, and I’m confident we can get back to doing that this year. It just takes time. You have to be patient. But yes, I have a good belief in the team and I think we can have the best car this year.”

The double-DNS in Shanghai was due to two different problems with the same Mercedes-supplied component, and Norris says the specifics have been identified in the gap between races.

“Alongside HPP [Mercedes High Performance Powertrains], I think it took a little bit of time to figure things out, but yes," he said. "Of course it hurt us as a team; certainly didn’t make us look good to have two cars not starting a race.

“I think what hurt more is the fact it was out of our control. But with HPP we’ve worked hard to figure things out, to understand how it happened, why it happened, and of course we’ll do everything we can to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But you live and you learn.

“It was a tough one for all of us. None of us want to have a weekend like that, and especially start a Sunday like that. So yeah, it hurt a lot, but I think at the same time it’s a good time for us to learn and step back and move on to this weekend.”