Norris and McLaren 'don't have car' to fight for title
Norris and McLaren 'don't have car' to fight for title
Andrew Benson - F1 Correspondent in Zandvoort Sun, August 23, 2026 at 8:03 PM UTC
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World champion Lando Norris has moved up to fourth place in the drivers' standings following his victory in Zandvoort
Lando Norris says he and McLaren "don't have the car I need to fight for a championship", despite a second consecutive win to open the second half of the Formula 1 season.
The Briton's victory in the final Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, following on from his first win of the season in Hungary last month, was of the highest calibre.
As such, it raises the prospect of the sort of championship fightback staged by Red Bull's Max Verstappen against Norris himself last year.
After this race last year, Norris' team-mate Oscar Piastri had a 34-point advantage over the Briton and 104 over Verstappen. Yet Verstappen, after one of the all-time great fightbacks, finished the season just two points behind Norris as he won the title in Abu Dhabi
Norris' masterful victory in Zandvoort has left him 83 points off the lead, held by Mercedes' Kimi Antonelli, who he and McLaren passed on track after losing the lead at the chaotic start of the day.
Antonelli's team-mate George Russell is tied on points with Ferrari's Lewis Hamilton, 59 behind the Italian.
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But while McLaren have made a major step forward with upgrades to their car that led to convincing wins in both Hungary and now the Netherlands, Norris believes that the car still has too many flaws to mount the sort of consistent attack Verstappen produced last year.
"I'm confident because we clearly have a strong car," he said. "We have a strong car in certain areas. It's not like last year where we were pretty good everywhere.
"We're very, very strong in high speed, and that's the place we've improved the car the most, is high-speed performance. No one matches us in high speed, and that's a good thing.
"My pace advantage to Mercedes in Turn Seven, Eight was crazy, but their advantage that they have to us in slow speed is also crazy.
"And therefore, I don't have the confidence to say, 'Yeah, I can easily fight for a championship for the rest of the season.'
"I know I've just won two races in a row and had two poles in a row, but at the minute I don't have the car I need to fight for a championship. And I know that's quite a big comment."
Norris' belief is based on his understanding that McLaren's slow-speed performance will be a handicap at the next race in Monza, and two races after that in Azerbaijan.
Both tracks are dominated by long straights, which penalise the McLaren's high drag compared to Mercedes, and have very few high-speed corners where the car's strength can compensate for its weaknesses in slow turns.
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said: “If we can confirm our improvements in Monza, then we can look with some optimism at the remainder of the season.”
Norris' victory in Zandvoort, built around an off-set strategy and devastating pace once the cars were on the hard tyres in the second stint, underlined the level at which he is now operating.
As impressive as Verstappen's revival was last year, Norris' own in the second half of the season was almost as good, as both made up ground on Piastri.
And Norris believes he has built on the progress he made in his driving after a difficult start to 2025 to perform on an even higher plane in 2026.
"I was driving at a high level the second half of last year," he said. "It's tough to say, but I do think it's a trickier car to drive this year in some ways. And I think you can see that because the gaps between team-mates are often bigger this year, I would say, than it was last year.
"I do believe I'm able to understand situations better, to understand the car in a better way. It's still just horrible to drive, but I'm doing a better job at just understanding this, relaying this to my team, figuring stuff out.
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"So, it's not just I'm driving better on track. I'm certainly eliminating my weaknesses on track, and I don't have so many, but it's also how I work off the track. And for me, yesterday to today is a perfect example of the work we put in overnight transformed our race and gave me the opportunity to win."
Reigning constructors' champions McLaren are third in the standings, 162 points off leaders Mercedes
Team principal Andrea Stella said he believed Norris was driving better than ever.
"Lando is driving and operating at a very high level," Stella said. "He's driving at the level of a world champion.
"What I like the most of his journey in Formula 1 is that he keeps improving.
"After the start of the 2025 season, something clicked, which is not only a single click, but it's a way of working with Lando, for Lando, and that we are adopting also on Oscar's side now in particular.
"This approach has led Lando to continuous improvements.
"It's almost like I see Lando stronger and stronger race by race. Because I think this weekend was nowhere near a weekend in which we could fight for the victory for granted, especially after having seen the performance in the sprint (in which Norris was passed by Ferrari's Charles Leclerc and finished third).
"But we invested in trying to understand where was the opportunity from a tyre exploitation point of view and car improvement.
"And then when you have conditions in which the car slides in the race, there's not much grip, then I think he is the master in these kind of conditions."
A couple of months ago, before the British Grand Prix, and before McLaren had won a race this season, Norris admitted in an interview with BBC Sport "a little bit" of frustration at not being able to defend the title he won last year.
So it's perhaps no surprise that now he appears to have at least an outside chance of making a fist of it, he is not making any presumptions.
"One race at a time," he said. "I know a lot of people say it now, but it's the truth of it. There's no point thinking that far ahead.
"Obviously, two great weekends, but there's still plenty of things we can do better, and we need to do better if we want to fight for a championship.
"It's still harder than I would like, and I don't want a bigger gap, so we have to keep working hard. There's still plenty of races, plenty of opportunity for everyone. So, keep my head down, keep working, and they'll keep coming."
McLaren's progress has come in the context of stagnation at Mercedes, whose lack of an upgrade to their car since Canada in May has led to them being caught by McLaren and Ferrari, a situation that has raised eyebrows among rival teams.
The next Mercedes upgrade is not due until the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia in four races' time.
For Antonelli - who also faces a grid penalty at his home race in Italy next time out because he needs to take a new engine that exceeds his allowance as a consequence of early-season reliability problems - it cannot come soon enough.
"Now as a team we need to find a little bit of time because McLaren have done a huge step," he said.
"So for sure, in this race, it's going to be more difficult, it's going to be challenging, but we're ready to do our best and to maximise every opportunity.
"And then hopefully it's going to be our turn to bring the package that's going to give us a little bit of the upper hand again."
Source: “AOL Sports”
