McLaren not good enough at Silverstone, Norris admits
Lando Norris pulls no punches after qualifying sixth, seven-tenths off pole, as McLaren's engine and aero woes pile up at their home race.
McLaren not good enough at Silverstone, and reigning world champion Lando Norris is not hiding it. After a bruising qualifying session for the 2026 British Grand Prix, Norris delivered one of the most honest verdicts of the season so far. And the numbers back him up.
Norris: McLaren not good enough and “in a pickle” at Silverstone
Norris admitted that the McLaren MCL40 is “not good enough” after a frustrating qualifying session left him in sixth place. He was only P11 in Q1, barely scraped through Q2 in P10, and the gap of 0.766 seconds to pole man Kimi Antonelli told its own story.
Norris explained the core problem clearly: “We need to understand, like, we’re just slow in the straight, we’re slow in every corner. It’s just that the car is not very efficient. We lack downforce and we have too much drag. So, yeah, we’re in a pickle.”
The nature of Silverstone made things worse. Norris added: “There’s a lot of straights here and just high speed. We’re not very good in high speed, and we lose a lot in that. And slow speed, like it’s just… this shows who has a good car and who doesn’t. And it’s clear that we don’t.”
He was blunt about what that means: “There’s no excuses, the car’s not good enough, and we know that, and we just have to keep working hard.”
You can read more about the energy management challenges that make Silverstone so tough for the 2026 cars in our dedicated feature.
The Mercedes engine problem making McLaren not good enough at Silverstone
The aero deficit is only part of the story. McLaren is also missing a key technical upgrade that rivals already have.
McLaren CEO Zak Brown confirmed the team is not yet running Mercedes’ latest power unit upgrade at Silverstone, despite fellow customer teams already introducing the updated engine. Customer teams have the right to access the latest version, but with McLaren having mileage to complete on its current engines, the drivers do not yet have the newest spec.
While Mercedes introduced its newest engine at the Austrian Grand Prix, focused primarily on reliability improvements, Williams and Alpine have since moved onto the updated unit at Silverstone. McLaren remains the notable exception.
McLaren are privately questioning how Mercedes are treating them as they wait to receive the latest specification. Unlike fellow customers Alpine and Williams, McLaren have not yet been given access to fresh power units. Mercedes told the reigning world champions that their current components are too early in their life cycle to merit a change.
This is a consequence of McLaren’s early season reliability woes, including its double ‘did not start’ in China, which left it behind on distance covered.
While the latest version does not feature any outright performance upgrades, it does include reliability improvements. These allow Mercedes to run it more confidently which, alongside typical gains from fresh engines not suffering from end-of-life degradation, were suggested by Mercedes boss Toto Wolff to give a minor power boost.
If McLaren adds significant mileage at Silverstone, Zak Brown expects Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri to switch to the new specification ahead of the next race weekend in Belgium. You can check out our Belgian Grand Prix 2026 guide to see what awaits them at Spa.
Piastri also struggling, but Norris finds silver lining
Oscar Piastri finished seventh in the sprint before qualifying eighth for Sunday’s grand prix, his lowest qualifying result of the 2026 season. Norris fared better across Saturday, charging from sixth to third in the sprint, but McLaren remained well adrift of Mercedes and Ferrari across both sessions.
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella acknowledged that around 30% of the team’s time loss to Mercedes is on the straights, and that a significant part of it comes down to drag.
Urgency needed: McLaren not good enough to wait
Norris knows the team cannot afford to be patient. He said McLaren could not afford to wait for gradual progress: “We need to catch up eight tenths and we want to be ahead by two tenths. It’s a mixture of a lot of things. It’s still stuff that will take time. But the team know that time is not on our side. We don’t have all day and all week and all month to slowly understand it. We’ve got to understand the car now and we’ve got to bring parts to the car as quickly as possible and quicker than every other team.”
McLaren head into the British Grand Prix third in the F1 Constructors’ Championship, with Mercedes dominating the campaign by winning seven of the opening eight races, while Ferrari claimed the other victory through Lewis Hamilton.
It is a painful position for the reigning champions. Norris noted that finishing P3 in the sprint was “pretty insane” given the car was seven-tenths off on a single lap. That one moment of magic cannot cover for a deeper structural problem.
For more on the Silverstone weekend, see our report on Antonelli’s British GP sprint win. For the official McLaren perspective, visit Formula1.com’s full Norris interview.
