Lando Norris admits F1 title defence currently “pretty impossible” but belief in McLaren remains

Lando Norris admits that a Formula 1 title challenge is currently “pretty impossible” for McLaren – but he still believes that the season is long enough for the situation to change.

Norris currently lies sixth in the world championship, 98 points off current leader Andrea Kimi Antonelli.

He’s been impacted not just by McLaren’s rollercoaster form, but also by mechanical issues that saw him fail to start in China and retire in both Canada and Monaco.

“I think I'm dealing okay, to be honest,” Norris told media including Crash.net. “It hurts, of course, because I know I'm still not fighting for wins, and we're not fighting for podiums and things like that at the moment.

“I was still optimistic at the very early part of the season if we started not so strong that the season is long, and we can come from a points deficit through the middle of the year to the end of the year, and hopefully finish strong and be able to fight.

“But when you keep having, say, not even amazing weekends, 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', but for the time being, it's just impossible. So we just have to keep working hard. It hurts, but it's just racing sometimes.”

Norris stressed that the team can still become a winning force within this season, pointing to the MCL40’s strong form at some venues.

“I still believe we can win,” he said. “I still believe we should have won in Miami. So the fact that we could have won a race this year just on pure pace, and because we could have deserved it, that still gives me plenty of hope, considering how far off we were at the beginning of the year.

“I think it's just the DNFs, the reliability we've had, has hurt a lot. Monaco, I think, was a bit of an extra, just little knife, because we struggled a lot.”

Clarifying his earlier comment he said: “I don't think the title is impossible. I'm saying it makes it feel like it starts to be more impossible, but I would still believe, for as long as possible, that it is possible, and it's still on the cards.

“I still believe, as a team we can turn things around and make progress. But we're also against a team and a driver at the minute that's just dominating, that's not making mistakes, that's getting everything right, a driver that's doing an unbelievable job, and it's hard to ever have a lot of confidence if you're up against someone like that.”

“I think the thing that gives us confidence is still that Miami and Canada were still two decent weekends on pace, we could have had two podiums, we had one, we got have had a second. I think the hope is still there, the belief is still there, and now I will continue to believe that it's possible.

“And I think for us, we're still excited just to try and get some podiums going again, that excites us at the minute, and I'm so excited for us to get back to winning, because I think that's still possible.”

Norris conceded that he could also be facing grid penalties after his recent run of power unit issues depleted his pool of usable elements.

“I have no idea about the future,” he said when asked by Crash.net about the situation. “Of course, I'm towards the end of some of my allocations, but I can't do anything about that now. As a team, we can't really do anything about that.

“We can only maximise what we have, so I'm sure at some point I'll start running into having to take penalties and take parts that ideally I wouldn't be happy to. But that's just the situation we're in.”

Regarding the Monaco race day failure he said: “They explained it. They know what the problem was. I'm sure they've got fixes and things, but a lot of our issues have all been quite different at every point.

“When you go back to Montreal, whether you look at the practice two in Monaco, now the race last weekend, a lot of the issues are all quite different ones, and they're not always the same and repetitive things.

“It's kind of once you fix one thing, something else doesn't go right, but everyone's doing the best we can, so we just have to keep working on it.”