- Norris says 2025 title was worth every point McLaren has surrendered this season.
- McLaren sit 89 points behind Mercedes after 3 races, including double-DNF in China.
- Upgrades coming at Miami and Canada, and Norris believes the best is still ahead.
Lando Norris walked into the Japanese Grand Prix weekend carrying something most drivers never get to carry: a world championship. And when a reporter asked whether he wished McLaren had started the 2026 season stronger, even at the cost of last year’s title, Norris barely paused.
“The real question you probably ask is, would I rather be here and have won last year, or would I rather have a slightly better car now and not have won last year,” he told media, including RacingNews365, “and I think you know what my answer would be.”
He is right. Anyone who watched Norris chase Max Verstappen to the final lap of the final race last December already knows.
The cost of fighting to the final race
Norris secured his maiden drivers’ title at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, finishing third on the day but winning what mattered most.
He beat Verstappen by just two points, the closest title fight since the current points system arrived in 2010. It was McLaren’s first drivers’ championship since Lewis Hamilton in 2008.
That two-point margin is the thread that connects December’s triumph to this year’s troubles.
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has been open about it. The MCL40, he explained on the team’s official website, was shaped by two things: the relentless pressure of fighting for the title deep into the 2025 season, and a deliberate shift in design thinking.
“The design phase of the MCL40 was affected both by the fact that we continued to fight for the Championship right up to the final race in 2025 and by a different approach to design,” Stella said.
That different approach was a choice, not an accident. The team prioritised building a car that could grow, not one built to shine straight out of the garage.
“We wanted to make sure that the launch spec of the car was a healthy platform for development,” Stella added. “As we know, there is a long way to go with the new 2026 regulations.”
The thinking was sound. During the 2025 season, Stella had cautioned that Red Bull’s aggressive push for short-term results risked damaging their 2026 programme.
He told ESPN at the time that heavily compromising the 2026 project was the price of pushing too hard, and that McLaren had been “very considerate in the timing of switching our full resources to 2026.”
The irony is not lost. McLaren and Red Bull now find themselves in a similar place, both trailing the early 2026 leaders.
A difficult opening to the new era
Three races in, the numbers tell an uncomfortable story. McLaren sits third in the constructors’ standings with 46 points. Ferrari is second with 90. Mercedes leads with 135.
Norris trails Kimi Antonelli, the early championship leader, by 47 points.
The low point came in China. Both Norris and Oscar Piastri failed to start due to reliability failures. Stella described them as electrical problems of different natures.
It was the kind of weekend that felt alien at a team which, just months earlier, had been celebrating a world title.
McLaren arrived in Japan with less race data than any of their rivals, making it harder to understand how their car behaved on a full tank, on worn tyres, over a race distance.
Stella also pointed to the power unit as a factor. Getting the most from the Mercedes engine, he admitted, took longer than the team expected.
Reliability problems in that area slowed down their learning even further.
Suzuka, though, offered something to hold onto. Piastri crossed the line in second, his first actual grand prix start of the season. Norris finished fifth. The gap to Mercedes was still there, but the weekend felt like a door opening rather than closing.
Norris remains bullish about McLaren’s recovery
Norris arrived in Japan not as a man in crisis, but as one who has been here before, or somewhere close enough to know how to respond.
“The car has a lot of potential,” he told reporters. “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.”
He framed the challenge not as a problem to survive but as a test worth taking on.
“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 at the minute,” Norris said.
After a Pirelli tyre test at the Nurburgring, held during the five-week break between the Japanese and Miami Grands Prix, Norris completed 108 laps in a single day.
It was time on track that the team badly needed after the lost weekends earlier in the year.
In a statement released through McLaren after that test, he was measured but firm. “We’ve been there, done it, learned from it, and I trust that this team knows how to do it again.”
Stella confirmed that a package of aerodynamic upgrades will arrive across the Miami and Canadian Grand Prix weekends. Crucially, he said this was part of the original plan, not a response to panic.
Norris knows what third place in a championship feels like. He also knows what first place feels like now. The distinction matters to him.
“It’s not like we’re bad,” he said. “We’re still the third-best team at the minute, but we certainly enjoy being first a lot more than third. So, time will tell.”
He said it without drama. A world champion who made his trade and is content with the terms, waiting for the car to catch up with the crown.
