Reigning Formula 1 World Champion Lando Norris admits that McLaren need to “step it up as much as possible” ahead of this weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix.
The Briton could only begin his title defence with fifth place last weekend in Melbourne, as Norris finished more than 50 seconds behind race winner, George Russell.
Despite there only being a week between the first two rounds of the season, Norris claims McLaren have been working hard to reduce the gap.
“It’s been a busy week for the whole team, both the team that are here travelling but also the team back in MTC [McLaren Technology Centre], trying to step it up as much as possible,” said Norris during Thursday’s media day in Shanghai.
“[It has been] full of learnings – some good things, some not so good things, but all things that we need to [and] we want to improve on… Learn what we could from others, learn what we could from ourselves, and do a much better job all-round here in Shanghai.”
Despite sharing the same power unit as Teams’ Championship leaders Mercedes, Norris suggested that McLaren still need to get on top of understanding the new units – while a less-than-optimised chassis meant the reigning champions have been forced to play catch-up at the start of the 2026 campaign.
“It’s understanding of the power unit – we haven’t done as good of a job as we should have done, so our own understanding is not to the level we want it to be at and the team have worked very hard to improve that,” said Norris.
“But I also said, the chassis is not to the level that we want it to be at. It’s certainly not bad and we’re certainly not miles away – I think we’re not as far as it almost looked in Melbourne.
“We need to improve it more, but we know that – we know where we’re stronger, we know where we’re weaker.
“Our tyre management was pretty tricky last weekend in Melbourne and might be quite tricky again here with the graining. We kind of need to improve a little bit of everything, honestly – it wasn’t just one thing or just the other.
“Both our car and our understanding of the power unit needs to improve, and the team have done a lot of work on that to try and do better this weekend.”
