Lando Norris Admits His McLaren Is ‘Nowhere Near Good Enough’ to Fight for the Title After Zandvoort Sprint Frustration

• Lando Norris finished third in the Dutch Grand Prix Sprint at Zandvoort but said his McLaren is “nowhere near good enough” to fight for the championship.
• The reigning world champion trails Kimi Antonelli by 90 points, with his only win of the season coming at the Hungarian Grand Prix before Formula 1’s summer break.
• Norris said McLaren’s latest upgrades helped him reach the sprint podium but insisted the car still lacks pace through Zandvoort’s slow-speed corners.

Lando Norris does not sound like a driver convinced he can defend his Formula 1 title. The McLaren driver finished third in Saturday’s sprint race at the Dutch Grand Prix, but rather than enjoy a podium finish, he used the result to lay out exactly what is still wrong with his car.

Norris arrived at Zandvoort 90 points behind championship leader Kimi Antonelli, a gap that has widened in the weeks after his only win of the season came at the Hungarian Grand Prix before the sport’s summer shutdown. His verdict on the 24-lap sprint left little room for optimism: the car, in his words, simply is not fast enough where it needs to be.

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We Don’t Have the Pace

Norris qualified second for the sprint, just 0.041 seconds off pole, and ran close to the front early on. But he lost ground steadily and was eventually passed by Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, leaving him to hold off championship leader Kimi Antonelli for the final podium spot.

“We don’t have the pace in general, slow-speed corners we struggle so much compared to others. There is nothing we can do,” Norris said. “The car is very good in high-speed and nowhere near good enough in slow-speed.”

He explained that the shortfall is impossible to hide once a driver cannot carry speed through the slower sections of a lap. “To keep up was very difficult. You can’t push in slow-speed during the race and therefore can’t optimise our strengths and more of our weaknesses show.”

A Problem He Does Not Expect to Vanish Overnight

Asked whether a fix could arrive before the rest of the race weekend, Norris was blunt: “No, otherwise we would have done it already.”

He pointed back to Hungary, where McLaren’s slow-speed weakness was also present but did not stop him winning. “In Budapest we were good in high-speed corners and pretty terrible in slow-speed but we still managed to win,” he added. “There are a lot more slow-speed corners here, more of our problems show. It is what we expected. There’s nothing we can do about it now, it is just how the car is for the time being.”

A Podium That Still Left Him Wanting More

Speaking to formula1.com after the sprint, Norris gave a similar assessment of a session in which he started well but faded. “Not a bad result. Not the best, would’ve been nice to be a little bit faster today but Charles was just too quick. I don’t think it was the tyres, we just lacked pace. We’re not quick enough and we have some work to do.”

He credited the upgrade package McLaren brought to Zandvoort for keeping him in touch with the podium places at all. “The upgrades have all worked and they allowed me to be P3 today but we need more if we want to be fighting for a championship.”

Even so, third place was not enough to satisfy a driver still chasing his title defence. “Even with a P3, I want to be fighting for top spot and trying to push forward and challenge George.”

Piastri Shares the Frustration

Norris’s team mate Oscar Piastri fared worse, dropping to fifth on the opening lap and unable to recover, finishing more than 10 seconds behind sprint winner George Russell. “The start was a bit average,” Piastri admitted. “Charles went a lot more to the inside than I thought he was going to. I just got pinched in behind him. But the pace wasn’t great either for both cars, it looked like, some work to do.”

For a team that arrived at Zandvoort hoping its seaside layout would flatter the MCL40’s high-speed strengths, the sprint instead exposed the same slow-speed weakness that has followed Norris and Piastri through the second half of the season. With the championship gap widening rather than closing, Norris now faces the rest of the Dutch Grand Prix weekend needing far more than another podium finish to keep his title defence alive.

Bigger Trouble Ahead

Zandvoort’s slow-speed corners have highlighted a weakness Norris has now flagged twice in successive race weekends, and the timing is awkward. This is the final Dutch Grand Prix on the calendar, run in front of a sold-out crowd of more than 100,000 fans who have made the trip largely to cheer on home favourite Max Verstappen, leaving little sympathy for a struggling title contender from another team.

McLaren sit third in the constructors’ championship with 230 points, some way off the pace they set when they won the title in each of the past two seasons. Norris, fifth in the drivers’ standings and 90 points off the top, now needs a big second half of the season if his title defence is to have any chance of surviving beyond the summer.

Expectations That Did Not Match Reality

Many observers felt the seaside circuit at Zandvoort would suit Norris and McLaren given the strength the team has shown in high-speed corners this year. Norris himself believes the opposite happened, with a lap that punishes drivers through its slower sections instead exposing exactly the weakness he had hoped to hide.

He had briefly looked capable of challenging Russell for the win, holding second early on before Leclerc’s Ferrari reeled him in and swept past into Turn 1 on lap 18. From there Norris had to settle for managing the gap back to Antonelli rather than pushing forward, the exact scenario he says he wants to avoid for the rest of the season.

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Written by

Jack Renn

Jack Renn is an editor at F1 Chronicle and a veteran motorsport journalist with 25 years of experience covering Formula 1 and international motorsport. A member of the Association Internationale de la Presse Sportive (AIPS), the global body representing accredited sports journalists, Jack has spent his career reporting from paddocks and press rooms across the F1 calendar. His work spans race analysis, technical insight, and in-depth features, giving readers authoritative coverage grounded in decades of firsthand experience at the highest level of the sport.

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