‘A pretty good year’ – Lando Norris defends McLaren’s development progress ahead of 2026 Formula 1 Mexico City Grand Prix

Lando Norris has defended McLaren’s 2026 development progress ahead of the Mexico City Grand Prix, and believes that the team have “had a pretty good year” after a tough start to the campaign.

The reigning World Champions suffered a slow start under the new ruleset, which included a double Did Not Start for Norris and McLaren team mate Oscar Piastri in China.

The team have made steady progress during the season, which culminated in Norris taking back-to-back wins in Hungary and the Netherlands, while a third victory in Madrid was denied due to an ill-timed Virtual Safety Car.

Although McLaren have fallen away from the front of the pack in recent races due to a difficult handling car, Norris is proud of the work achieved by the team so far.

“The car has been horrible and difficult to drive the whole season, just other teams have brought a lot more upgrades since and improved a lot more than what we have. Nothing more than that,” said Norris during Thursday’s media day in Mexico City.

“The team is still doing a good job, considering we were almost one and a half seconds off at the beginning of the year, one second off. The fact we even won almost three races was a pretty sizeable achievement in itself.

“So I think we’ve had a pretty good year, if we want to look at it from that perspective. Of course, we hold ourselves to a very high level, and we want to win everything we can.

“We started a long way behind at the beginning of the season, and we’ve done a good job to catch up. We’ve done better than the majority of other teams on the grid.”

McLaren sit equal on points with Red Bull for P3 in the teams’ standings, with two victories for Max Verstappen in recent races proving pivotal.

Piastri believes that staying ahead of Red Bull will prove difficult over the remainder of 2026 – with McLaren’s focus already on 2027 – but remains hopeful.

“You just have to keep fighting. I think at the moment we know we’re not as competitive consistently as Red Bull are, but we’re adding performance to the car still, and there’s a lot of things that can happen,” said Piastri.

“Reliability has been a big topic this year, so there’s still plenty of ways it can turn. But clearly, on pure performance, we need to make some steps forward, and we do still have some things coming to the car that’ll hopefully help with that.

“I think for us, it’s going to be a big challenge to stay ahead of Red Bull, but we’re always up for it.”