Steiner Backs Lando Norris to Finish Second in 2026 Title Race
Lando Norris looks like a different driver right now, and Guenther Steiner has noticed. The former Haas team boss believes the McLaren driver’s current run of form is strong enough to carry him to second place in the 2026 world championship.
Speaking on The Red Flags Podcast, Steiner didn’t hold back. “He will be second if he continues like this. Look how happy the Lando boy is,” he said, pointing to Norris’s mood as much as his results.
Steiner’s history with Norris goes back further than most fans realise, to earlier encounters involving Norris in the junior categories. That connection makes this endorsement carry a little extra weight. Steiner has never been shy about handing out blunt verdicts on drivers, teams or strategy, and he rarely says something simply to please a paddock full of listeners.
That’s part of why this prediction has cut through. It’s a bold call, but not one plucked from thin air. It’s built on a run of results that few others in the paddock can match right now, and on a driver who looks calmer under pressure than he has in years.
Inside Norris’s Recent Form: Wins, Poles, and Recovery Drives
Norris currently sits fourth in the drivers’ championship, but the shape of his season has shifted sharply over the last month. Two wins and three pole positions in his last four grands prix tell their own story.
The turnaround began in Hungary, where Norris converted pole into a commanding victory. He followed it with another win at the Dutch Grand Prix, a circuit that rewards precision over raw power, exactly where his current form shows best.
Monza brought a tougher weekend. Norris finished fourth there, a track that has rarely flattered McLaren’s low-drag setup as much as some rivals. Still, the points kept his championship push alive, and there was no sign of the momentum stalling once the paddock moved on.
Madrid produced the most eye-catching result of the run. Norris led the Spanish Grand Prix comfortably until an ill-timed virtual safety car dropped him from first to fifth in the space of a lap. He didn’t settle for damage limitation.
Norris clawed his way back through the field to finish third, a result that said plenty about his racecraft on a bad day, not just his pace on a good one. Plenty of drivers fold after a stroke of luck like that. Norris didn’t.
Two wins, three poles and a fighting recovery drive in four races: it’s the kind of stretch that turns heads in the paddock, Steiner’s included. It’s also the kind of run that shifts how rivals plan their own weekends, because nobody wants to hand Norris a gap to exploit.
Telemetry Precision and Expert Breakdown of McLaren’s Pace
Norris himself rated his Madrid pole lap among the finest of his career, calling it “probably one of the best laps I’ve done ever in my career.” McLaren team principal Andrea Stella went further, breaking the lap down using the data rather than instinct.
“It was a consequence of pushing to the level that Lando managed to push to, and when you look at the telemetry, it is the precision, the braking, the speed carried on entry, the striking of the kerb, the going on power. Everything was executed with a pretty unique level of precision, and for me, the main attribute that would be associated with this lap was just incredible precision in the metre-by-metre execution. I think Lando offered one of the best performances of his career.”
That level of detail matters. It’s not the kind of praise a team principal hands out lightly, and it explains why McLaren staff talk about this lap differently from most of Norris’s other standout performances this year.
McLaren has spent years building a car capable of rewarding this kind of precision, something Steiner himself has touched on in Steiner’s assessment of McLaren and their long-term engineering plans. A driver and a car working in that kind of harmony rarely stays a secret for long.
It’s showing up on the timing screens most weekends now, not just in isolated flashes. That consistency is exactly what separates a strong month from a genuine title push, and it’s why Stella’s telemetry breakdown carries so much weight inside the team.
The Championship Picture: Closing the Gap on Antonelli and Russell
The numbers still show how much work is left. Lando Norris sits 106 points behind championship leader Andrea Kimi Antonelli, five points behind Lewis Hamilton, and 25 points behind George Russell in the standings.
Closing a gap that size to Antonelli in the time remaining looks unlikely, and Steiner’s prediction never claimed otherwise. Second place, not the title, is the target he’s backing Norris to reach.
Given where Norris stood a month ago, even that would mark a serious late-season turnaround. Hamilton’s gap of just five points is the one that will matter most in the coming weeks, and it’s the margin Norris will be watching closest on every timing screen.
Russell’s 25-point cushion looks more comfortable on paper, but it’s the kind of gap a driver in this sort of form can chip away at quickly. Two wins and three poles in four races is not a run that shows any sign of fading just yet.
The Crash.net report on Guenther Steiner’s prediction is worth reading in full for the wider context behind these comments. It isn’t the first time Steiner has weighed in with a firm view, as we saw in Steiner’s recent F1 predictions about Max Verstappen’s own struggles this year.
What’s clear is that Norris has given himself a fighting chance. Two wins, three poles and a recovery drive that showed real character have put him back in the conversation. Catching Hamilton and Russell before the season ends won’t be easy, but for the first time in weeks, McLaren fans have real reason to believe.
