“A reality check” – why Lando Norris was expecting poor Monaco qualifying

Lando Norris’s 2026 season is shaping up to be the most disappointing one for a defending champion since Sebastian Vettel’s catastrophic 2014.

But while Vettel’s year was defined by struggles with an uncompetitive and unreliable Renault engine, McLaren’s 2026 has been an accumulation of small but telling frustrations: a chassis that’s effective enough for Norris to have won the Miami sprint race from pole, but troubled by a lack of front-end ‘feel’ and the presence of mysterious electrical gremlins.

Neither car started the Chinese Grand Prix, and McLaren had to break curfew overnight in Monaco to replace Norris’s wiring harness and other electrical components after his car stopped in FP2 on Friday. But it was the inability of the MCL40 to instil confidence in its drivers which consigned Norris and team-mate Oscar Piastri to the fourth row of the grid, over half a second off Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s polesitting Mercedes.

What’s interesting is that while team principal Andrea Stella told reporters in Canada that the MCL40 is reasonably strong in slow corners, and could be expected to perform well around a circuit like Monaco, Norris’s expectations were different. Indeed, he had thought ahead of the event that the fourth row was his most likely destination.

“I think just a slight difference of opinion,” Norris said in Monaco when pressed on this topic. 

“Obviously I’m the one driving the car, so I can tell the difficulty of extracting lap time, how difficult it was already last [race] weekend in Montreal. That’s why I was so surprised last weekend to be as competitive as we were. 

“I think coming here is quite a, not an eye-opener, but still a slight reality check of how far off we are.

“I didn’t have high hopes into this weekend. The car is just very difficult to drive, not very compliant, not very forgiving in any way. 

“So my confidence level last year was 100, now it’s 85. And around Monaco, you know, you need to be at 100.”

In Montreal, McLaren trialled a new front wing which it ultimately decided to remove, pending further evaluation in Monaco. But the results remain inconclusive; Piastri reverted to the previous spec ahead of qualifying, but his margin of just over a tenth over his team-mate could be accounted for by Norris stepping over the limit on his fastest lap.

Last season Norris struggled initially with the driveability of his car, saying he wasn’t “clicking” with it. That issue was eased out with a different front suspension geometry.

But Norris’s comments this weekend suggest another case of McLaren fielding a car which has great theoretical potential in terms of lap time, but the drivers struggle to access that performance – leading to a difference in outlook between them and the engineers. And again the front end seems to be a limiting factor.

Norris also reckoned that while he might have left a couple of tenths on the table through small errors such as the lock-up at the chicane on his final push lap, fundamentally the car isn’t quick enough to bridge that half-second gap to the leaders.

“You’re always trying to push the car to the limit in every aspect, it’s just our limit’s here and the others’ is slightly above,” he said. “It’s as simple as that. It’s also not as simple as that. 

“We struggle with some attributes, with front locking and the front of the car just not working very well. But this is a car thing, not a tyre thing, or a combination, and this is something we have to work on.”

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– The Motorsport.com Team

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