Lando Norris went into 2026 as the reigning World Champion, but his early expectations for the season were lowered as he qualified on the third row for the Australian Grand Prix, leading him to blame a substantial list of issues he encountered.
The weekend got off to a less than ideal start as he was forced to sit out of the majority of FP1 while McLaren prioritised precautionary gearbox checks on his car. His return to the track in FP2 was smoother, but he finished the day in P7 while his team mate Oscar Piastri led the field.
The Briton then dropped to eighth place in the final hour of practice before resetting for Qualifying, where he faced deployment problems throughout. He nevertheless progressed to Q3, during which he ran over a duct cooling
fan that had been left on Kimi Antonelli’s Mercedes and was deposited on track – the Silver Arrows were subsequently fined for releasing the car in an unsafe condition.
However, Norris was unable to avoid it on track, shattering the fan as he made contact, and the McLaren driver believed the damage impacted his running and left him unable to challenge for anything higher than P6.
“I had some damage on the front wing which certainly didn’t help, from that massive piece of debris that I hit,” he explained after Qualifying. “I don’t know how much it cost me but it certainly cost me a chance of P3.
“I think really where we lost out this weekend is the amount of issues we’ve had through FP1, FP2 and FP3. I just never got up to speed, never did enough laps.
“The more laps I do, the better it is for me to figure out how to drive this thing. The more laps you do, the better the engine works so the issues have really just hurt us a lot this weekend. Frustrating, but it’s the way it is and we’ve made the most of what we have I think.”
Piastri, looking for a positive result at his home event, qualified in P5 just ahead of Norris after featuring in the top three for much of the session. His final effort of 1m 19.380s was around eight-tenths off George Russell’s pole position lap, giving McLaren the mission of closing down the gap.
“I think it’s about where we thought we would be,” the Australian said. “Obviously, behind the two Mercedes it’s pretty close so it’s not a huge surprise that we are where we are.
“I think it went reasonably smoothly out there today and I think we executed mostly pretty good so I can’t complain from that side, but obviously we need to find a bit of time because the sandbags well and truly got dropped out. Let’s wait and see how we can try and find some performance but we can build a solid base from there.
“After yesterday, we thought maybe it was an overly optimistic picture of where we were, but we looked like we were in the mix for pole. Then in FP3 we got blown out of the water. We’ve got some things to try and find but I’m sure we’ll get there.”
.webp?ssl=1 "George Russell heads Mercedes 1-2 in opening practice session in Japan")
