Lando Norris heads into the 2026 F1 Barcelona-Catalunya GP weekend after an unfortunate retirement at the Monaco GP. The retirement was his second consecutive, and both were due to issues outside the driver’s control.
Norris: Any title defence “just not possible” for the time being
On lap 45 of the Monaco GP when running in a net P8, the McLaren driver experienced a battery-related issue and was forced to retire. Even before the technical issues struck, McLaren are far from last year’s performance.
Last season, McLaren was immensely dominant, easily taking the Constructors’ Championship by the end of the Singapore round. Lando Norris also won the Drivers’ Championship. This season, everything has changed.
Ahead of the F1 Barcelona-Catalunya GP, Norris was asked how he is dealing with technical problems beyond his control.
“I think I’m dealing okay to be honest. It hurts of course, because I know I’m not sort of fighting for wins and we’re not fighting for podiums and things like that at the moment. But I’m still optimistic, at the very early part of the season, if we start not so strong, that the season is long and we can come from our points deficit through the middle of the year to the end of the year and hopefully finish strong and be able to fight.
“You know, when you keep having, say not even amazing weekend, but when you have things that keep going wrong, you cannot build confidence in the car, you cannot try things. All of this is making any title defence pretty impossible for the time being. It hurts me, but it also hurts the whole team.
“None of us want to not finish races. We all want to give ourselves another chance to defend the Constructors, and to defend the Drivers’ [Championship], but for the time being it’s just not possible. So we have to keep working hard. It hurts, but it’s just racing sometimes.”
A rookie to drive Norris’ car in FP1 at the F1 Barcelona-Catalunya GP
While Norris can only hope to bounce back strong at the F1 Barcelona-Catalunya GP, he misses out on FP1. F1 teams are mandated to have a rookie in their car four times during a practice session in 2026. In Barcelona, F2 champion Leonardo Fornaroli will be driving the McLaren driver’s car.
Norris was asked about his remarks earlier in the year, when he said that under this set of regulations, if you miss a session, you are far behind because you have so much to learn that you did not cover in it.
When asked whether this was still the case, the Brit said:
“Still a good amount. Of course, some of the other changes that have happened with the harvest limits and things like this have maybe made it fractionally better. You can try fractionally more, just pushing pace, and just drive rather than thinking so much about the power unit, but you still have to think quite a lot about the power unit and maybe haven’t so much in Montreal or Monaco.
“Here, you’re returning quite a bit more back to superclips and all of these things that are going to be happening on almost every single straight. So there’s still certainly that amount of laps. There’s still certainly that amount that the more you can do the better, but less than maybe the very beginning of the season. I think we all know how to drive these cars a little bit more based of what we’ve learnt over the first part of the season. So not so right now, but I would still love to be in FP1 somewhere.”
