McLaren says they won't switch their focus to the 2027 car yet because I'm not sure it ever works

Lando Norris says that even though the season has started off badly McLaren won't give up on the 2026 Formula 1 campaign to work on its 2027 project.

McLaren the reigning constructors champion has become the third fastest team so far as F1 switched to new technical rules. Its qualifying time difference with Mercedes went from 0.862 seconds in Australia to 0.354 seconds in Japan where Oscar Piastri led the race and finished second under the checkered flag.

Mercedes and Ferrari still have the upper hand but Norris says that doesn't mean McLaren should focus on its 2027 challenger.

We haven't started the season where we want to be but we still want to fight hard for the championship. This isn't a case of giving up and focusing on next year. I'm not sure if that approach ever really works the Briton who finished fifth at Melbourne and Suzuka and couldn't race in the Chinese GP because of an electronics problem told McLaren.

There are a lot of times when we haven't quite been where we want to be at the start of the year but we've ended up in a much stronger position by the end—2023 2024 and so on. We're a stronger team now than we were then." We have been there done that and learned from it. I trust that this team knows how to do it again. There is a lot of work to do but we are ready for it.

In 2023 McLaren was in fifth place with 12 points after three rounds but they ended up taking fourth place from Aston Martin with 302 points overall.

The next year the first three rounds had six points finishes but only one podium. The team won six grands prix and barely beat Ferrari for the constructors' title but Max Verstappen was too far ahead in the drivers' standings.

To put Norris's point of view in context two teams had different plans for how to develop their players in 2026. At the end of May Alpine all but stopped working on its 2025 challenger which kept it at the bottom of the standings. However it is now in fifth place in the current standings.

Red Bull kept pushing for the drivers' championship with Verstappen but it didn't work out and the team has now dropped to sixth. Team principal Laurent Mekies has said that his team is now paying the price for that title charge but he has no regrets.

The situation was different with the change in rules but Piastri is hopeful that something similar can happen this season because McLaren turned things around in 2024.

The Australian said "I have faith in this team that we'll be fighting for wins all season." "In round three [at Suzuka] even though there was still a gap at the end we were able to push the limits of what we thought we could do. Without the safety car we could have really been in the running for the win."

We have a lot of work to do to stay at the front but we can close the gap to Mercedes and out develop the rest of the field. This team has shown us how we can change things for the better and we're in a better position than we were in 2024 when we last did this. I trust the team completely to do everything they can to get us there and I'm really excited to see what we can do.