In the cooldown room after the 2026 Australian Grand Prix, Lando Norris was asked the question every McLaren post-race media session had pre-rehearsed: how does the new car compare? The answer he gave that day was not the one his team wanted printed.
'I think you know Ferrari from from what we see quite clearly have the best car,' Norris said. 'The cornering speeds are unbelievable. So for us to match that is zero chance at the minute and we have to work very hard to to understand things.'
It was an unusual moment. Norris is a famously honest interview, but the new-regulation era is supposed to be when McLaren's hard-won 2024 and 2025 progress translated into title contention. Instead, the season-opener verdict from the man in the lead McLaren seat read like a confession.
Eleven races on, half of that early diagnosis has held up. Ferrari's SF-26 remains, by chassis benchmarks, one of the two best cars on the grid. It carves through medium-speed corners in a way no rival has been able to replicate, and Maranello's run of aero innovations — the upside-down rear wing, the exhaust wings, the halo wings — has become the technical-talk story of the year. Team principal Fred Vasseur has admitted publicly that the boldness of those concepts was the result of a deliberate cultural shift away from a 'back foot' mindset Ferrari had carried for years.
But the second part of Norris's call has aged less well. Ferrari does have the best chassis. Ferrari does not, on the evidence of the first eleven rounds, have the best car. The package is being held back by a power-unit deficit to Mercedes that the SF-26's brilliant aerodynamics cannot disguise on long-straight circuits, and the championship belongs comfortably to the Brackley team that Norris did not mention in Melbourne.
The other part of his Australia review pointed somewhere even more interesting. Norris, speaking after Max Verstappen had launched a recovery drive from the back of the grid, was quick to credit the Red Bull pace nobody else wanted to.
'Red Bull is significantly faster despite Max starting last,' he said in the same interview. Verstappen, on a circuit where his car was not at its best and starting from pit lane, had still set the fastest lap of the race and overtaken cars in a way that suggested Red Bull's worst day was better than McLaren's best.
What has happened since is the inverse of what Norris saw in March. Mercedes has run away with the early-season championship lead through Kimi Antonelli, who arrived at Albert Park as a rookie and has since recorded the youngest debut win in F1 history, a streak of three consecutive Grand Prix victories, and a championship lead his teammate cannot match. Red Bull, the team Norris flagged as the surprise of Melbourne, has slipped backwards as the 2026 regulations have exposed shortcomings in its power-unit collaboration with Ford that no chassis work can paper over.
The most uncomfortable line for Norris's team principal Andrea Stella to re-read is the 'zero chance' one. McLaren has spent the months since Melbourne pushing a heavy upgrade programme, and the gap to Ferrari has narrowed without closing. Stella has been one of the loudest figures in the regulation-tweak conversations McLaren are pressing the FIA on — particularly closing-speed safety after Oliver Bearman's 50G Suzuka crash — but McLaren's pace through the medium-speed sections of any circuit still looks like the team's headline problem.
The flip side is that Norris's honesty in Melbourne may have given his team the runway it needed. Pre-season hype suggested McLaren had built another title contender. The lead driver's own assessment, delivered five races into the new era, told the team and the world that there was a chassis problem to solve, not a marketing one. That difference, paddock insiders say, has shaped how upgrades have been prioritised — and how realistic the 2026 expectations now look from Woking.
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*Originally published on [News Formula One](https://newsformula.one/article/lando-norris-melbourne-ferrari-best-car-zero-chance-revisited-mclaren-2026). Visit for full coverage.*