Lando Norris has expressed his view that McLaren are \u201cthree months behind\u201d their rivals in the 2026 development race, highlighting the \u201chuge effort\u201d that will be required to get back to winning ways.<\/p>\n
Norris<\/a> and McLaren<\/a> entered the season as the reigning World Champions, but they have so far been limited to occasional podium finishes, with poor reliability also costing them valuable results and points.<\/p>\n Barcelona appeared to mark a small step forward on Norris\u2019 side of the garage, with the Briton lining up fourth on the grid and finishing the race in third \u2013 capitalising on a late retirement for Mercedes<\/a>\u2019 Kimi Antonelli<\/a>.<\/p>\n Asked about team boss Andrea Stella\u2019s comments that McLaren had \u201cdefinitely raised the bar\u201d<\/a> in Barcelona, and how much more it can be raised in Austria this weekend, Norris replied: \u201cFor the time being, not a lot more.<\/p>\n \u201cI think that was more a universal term for how we have to perform as a team \u2013 not just simply we raised the bar and we just did a better job because of that. P3 was great, but we still need to do a lot better than that, especially if we want to catch up.<\/p>\n \u201cAs a team, we\u2019ve had to try and just extract more from every individual, including myself, so that\u2019s what we did there already. That\u2019s what we\u2019ll continue to try and do.\u201d<\/p>\n Pushed on whether one effective upgrade might be enough to push McLaren back to the top of the pecking order this season, Norris continued: \u201cNo. One good upgrade, no. We need three, four, five, but it depends.<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes you take one little piece at a time, sometimes you try to make something so everything goes together because it\u2019s a new philosophy. We\u2019re like two, three months behind \u2013 that\u2019s not one upgrade.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s a lot of bits, so I don\u2019t think we\u2019re going to be quickest any time soon. Hopefully over the next three, four, five months, we can catch up and narrow the gap to be on pace with them [our rivals].<\/p>\n \u201cTo catch up takes a huge effort from the team, which they\u2019re doing, and everyone\u2019s very excited and motivated because we know it\u2019s possible. We\u2019re like three months behind and that\u2019s a hard task to overcome, but everyone at McLaren knows we can achieve that, and we\u2019re excited to try and do it.\u201d<\/p>\n As part of that development push, Norris is set to trial a new \u201cexperimental\u201d rear wing<\/a> during Friday practice at the Red Bull Ring, though team mate Oscar Piastri has confirmed that the device will only be tested \u2013 and not raced \u2013 at this stage.<\/p>\n Norris sits fifth in the Drivers\u2019 Championship<\/a> after the first seven rounds of the season, 83 points down on leader Antonelli, while McLaren are third in the Teams\u2019 battle<\/a>, holding 141 points to Ferrari<\/a>\u2019s 190 and Mercedes\u2019 262.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lando Norris has expressed his view that McLaren are \u201cthree months behind\u201d their rivals in the 2026 development…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":761432,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":["post-761431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=761431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761431\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/761432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=761431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=761431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=761431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}