Lando Norris said McLaren’s straight-line deficit cost him during the 2026 F1 Qualifying session in Malaysia, despite feeling he had produced a strong lap at Sepang.
Norris qualified sixth with a 1:35.757, finishing just 0.005s ahead of teammate Oscar Piastri. However, Isack Hadjar’s five-place grid penalty will move the McLaren driver up to fifth for Sunday’s race after Hadjar exceeded his power unit allocation by taking a seventh internal combustion engine.
Max Verstappen claimed pole position, with Lewis Hamilton second and Hadjar third before his penalty. Norris ended the session more than six tenths away from Verstappen’s pole time, leaving McLaren behind Red Bull, Ferrari and a Mercedes and in the final Qualifying order.
Asked about the small margin between himself and Piastri, Norris said he first needed to look through both laps properly before judging where either driver might have lost a chunk of time versus the other.
“I need to see the laps, I need to see what the good things or bad things from each lap were,” Norris said.
“Obviously, there’s always a little bit in it as drivers, but I felt like my lap was very strong.”
Norris hurt by straight-line struggles
Norris said the bigger frustration came from McLaren’s lack of speed on the straights. While he felt comfortable with his own execution, he said the car continued to lose time in areas where he had little control.
Since Baku last weekend, the World Champion’s PU has been down on performance, even compared to his teammate.
“It’s tough, I’m still struggling a lot in the straights everywhere. I’m just down on every single straight.
“Every time I get a good exit, I’m just slow at the end of the straight, and it just hurts seeing this every single time.”
The Briton felt the result did not fully reflect the quality of his lap. Instead, he pointed to McLaren’s difficulty in extracting the full performance from its package around Sepang.
“So I should be higher up, not because I could have done a better job necessarily, but just because we’re not getting everything out of the car that we need to.
“That doesn’t make my life tough [just] today, but it also makes it tough for tomorrow.”
Norris unsure about race pace
After the 2026 F1 Qualifying session in Malaysia, Norris also kept expectations measured for Sunday’s race, particularly with rain still a possible factor. He admitted he did not yet know how McLaren’s current car would perform in wet conditions.
Nonetheless, his race pace at recent races until Baku suggests opportunities could arise on Sunday.
“I’ve never driven in the rain in this car so I don’t know if it’s good for us or worse for us,” Norris said.
“Normally it’s just the best cars that perform on a day like today are the best cars. We’re sixth and so we’re clearly not the closest.”
Tyre choices add another unknown
Norris expects the race to bring strategic uncertainty, with Sepang’s smooth surface and high thermal degradation making tyre behaviour difficult to predict.
“It’s a smooth track. It’s high degradation,” he said. “I think it should make for a good race for everyone tomorrow.
“I don’t know how the overtaking will be. Sometimes it can make that tougher. That means more strategy and people doing different things.
“You know a lot of people have different tyre [numbers] as well. Some are 5-1-1 [soft-medium-hard], some are 4-2-1, some are 4-1-2. It’s a challenge and I think that’s kind of how it should be, honestly.”
Norris said teams still lacked certainty over whether the harder compounds would prove more durable or whether the extra grip from softer tyres would make them easier to manage and have better pace.
“It’s tough. I mean it’s high degradation here because it’s thermally, very, very limited.
“Yeah, and the hard obviously lasts better, it doesn’t provide as much grip, so it’s hard to know if that’s better. But sometimes you slide more on the hard, sometimes therefore the soft that provides more grip., you can drive slower but have more grip and go quicker. I think that’s why it’s such a big variety, no one really knows and we’ll find out tomorrow.”
