Norris holds off Piastri as McLaren lack straight-line speed
Norris qualifies ninth as a straight-line deficit and a team-mate's Q3 mistake combine to cost McLaren dear at Monza.
Lando Norris finished fourth at Monza and Oscar Piastri fifth, two tenths apart after a fight that both McLaren drivers were told over the radio to calm down. Neither was ever in a position to win. Norris had already explained why on Saturday, and he did not soften it: “The most painful thing this weekend is just the straight-line speed deficit.”
Monza is the circuit that measures exactly one thing, and the MCL40 came up short on it.
Two tenths and a near miss between the McLarens
The two orange cars spent the closing stages of the Italian Grand Prix racing each other rather than anyone ahead. It got close enough that Piastri’s pit wall told him to keep it clean after he ran Norris towards the edge of the track. Both cars went off the circuit and rejoined during the scrap.
They finished nose to tail: Norris fourth at 19.056 seconds behind the winner, Piastri fifth at 19.253. Just under two tenths covered them after 53 laps. Behind Max Verstappen, and a long way behind the two Mercedes that fought over the win.
For a team that arrived at Monza on the back of two straight victories, fourth and fifth is a plain result. The interesting question is not who beat whom, but why neither of them was in the fight at the front.
Norris: “Our main weakness is a lack of straight-line speed”
Norris was direct about it after qualifying. “Our main weakness is a lack of straight-line speed, which means we are heavily reliant on securing a good slipstream to be competitive,” he said, adding that the session “ultimately reflected what we expected given our car’s performance on this track.”
He put a number on the gap by pointing at the eventual race winner. “Kimi could do a 22.1 or a 0 pretty much with no slipstream, so with the slipstream, he’s doing a 21.6 or something.”
That is the whole problem in one sentence. A car that needs a tow to be competitive is a car that cannot control its own qualifying, and at Monza it also cannot defend on the straights.
The tow that never arrived in Q3
McLaren’s plan for the final runs in Q3 was for Piastri to lead Norris out and give him a slipstream. Piastri locked up into the first chicane and aborted the lap. By the time he rejoined, Norris had gone past and was first on the road with nothing in front of him.
Piastri took it on himself. “I tried to probably be a bit too ambitious, locked the front and that was it.”
Norris reckons a slipstream is worth around half a second to the MCL40 at Monza, in a Q3 where half a second covered the entire top ten. He qualified ninth.
There was a second problem underneath the first. “It’s just a lot of pulling, just very inconsistent with what the brakes are doing,” Norris said. “With such a big braking zone as Turn 1, when the brakes are doing what they did today, you have no confidence.”
Piastri’s grid penalty for impeding Lawson
Piastri’s Saturday got worse after the session. The stewards gave him a three-place grid penalty for impeding Liam Lawson in Q2, when Lawson caught his McLaren coming out of the pits through the first chicane. Lawson was audibly unhappy on the radio and missed the cut for Q3.
The stewards accepted that Piastri had no other options available given the information he had at the time, but ruled that the impeding had happened regardless. The penalty moved him from third on the grid to sixth, and reshuffled the order behind him.
McLaren leave Monza further from the championship
Norris came to Italy having won in Hungary and at Zandvoort, closing on Kimi Antonelli in the standings. He leaves it further away than when he arrived. Antonelli’s win from 19th on the grid puts the Mercedes driver on 267 points, with Norris fourth in the championship on 171 and Piastri seventh on 116.
The full classification is on our Italian Grand Prix 2026 results page, and the story of the race is in our Monza race report.
Our view: one weekend, or a pattern
Monza is the outlier on the calendar, so it would be easy to write this off as one unrepresentative circuit. That is probably half right. McLaren has been quick enough elsewhere to win two races in a row, and no team is fast everywhere.
What makes it worth watching is that Norris did not describe a set-up problem. He described a characteristic of the car under the new power unit rules, and he said the team expected it before the weekend started. A team that knows it is slow in a straight line and cannot do much about it mid-season has a limited set of circuits where it can fight for wins, and a title race is not usually won on a limited set of circuits.
Next up is the Spanish Grand Prix at the new Madring circuit on 11 to 13 September, a track nobody has raced on yet. McLaren will find out quickly whether Monza was the exception.
