Lando Norris opens up on McLaren struggles: ‘I’m not as on it as last year’

Lando Norris has explained why he’s been struggling with this year’s McLaren F1 challenger after an error-strewn start to the year.

Norris lost the F1 drivers’ championship lead following two below-par weekends in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

The British driver could only qualify sixth at the Bahrain International Circuit following a mistake at the first corner in Q3.

While he was able to recover to third in the race, it was a race littered with errors, which included a five-second penalty for misjudging his starting position on the grid.

In Jeddah, Norris crashed out in Q3, leaving him 10th on the grid.

In an interview with The Race, Norris explained why things aren’t quite clicking this year.

“Especially when you’re going up against Max [Verstappen], when you’re going up against Oscar [Piastri], when you’re going up against George [Russell], Charles [Leclerc],” Norris explained.

“These are all guys which are trying to do a similar thing, and you can’t afford to leave a hundredth, two hundredths, three hundredths on the table. So you’re having to push it to that limit.

“And when you want to be able to push it to the limit, you got to feel every step of the way. You got to feel you’re on the limit of the braking, the turn in phase, the cornering phase and the exit.

“And as soon as you just have a little bit of a mismatch, and things aren’t reacting as you think they should, and you’re not able to kind of predict the understeer, or predict the oversteer.

“You’re having to think, and as soon as you have to consciously think, you’re losing hundredths of a second or thousandths of a second. And that’s just enough to make me happy and not happy.”

Norris not able to be “precise” with 2025 McLaren

Despite his difficulties with the MCL39, Norris sits 10 points behind his teammate in the standings ahead of this weekend’s F1 Miami Grand Prix.

While Norris was unable to finish on the podium in Jeddah following his practice crash, he will take confidence from his pace, which seemed to be a step ahead of Piastri.

Norris will also be full of confidence, given that he won his first F1 race last year in Miami.

Explaining further about his struggles in 2025, Norris said: “So the harder it gets, the more precision you need, the more precision you need, the more feel and on top of the car you got to feel, and that’s an area I felt like I was very good at the end of last season and really understood, and I’m not able to be as on it as I was at the end of last year.

“And therefore I paid the price in either some bigger mistakes or some lock ups or different things. I’m not able to be as precise as what I need to be, and that’s costing me.

“But it’s not like I don’t know how or why, necessarily. I think we understand some of the reasoning, but we don’t get many opportunities just to go out and try different things.”