Lando Norris was forced to retire from the Formula 1 Monaco Grand Prix after yet another engine failure impeded the Briton’s title defence.
The Mercedes power unit in the back of Norris’ MCL40 gave on Lap 45 on the streets of the Principality, on Sunday.
This makes it two engine-related DNFs for the reigning World Champion in consecutive races.
Norris was locked in battle with the Alpine of Pierre Gasly and the Mercedes of George Russell when his power unit just gave up coming out of the Tunnel.
“Yeah, there was just a lot of stuff I could hear from the engine, the turbo, the battery, a lot of things that don’t sound correct,” he told media including Motorsport Week.
“We tried to fix it; it made the problem worse.
“We put it back, so I had the problems again, but seemed to have to live with it, and then, in the end, they just completely went.”
Lando Norris refuses to write off F1 title defence but begs McLaren to do better
The Woking-based team came into the Monaco GP weekend celebrating its 1000th Grand Prix.
That said, throughout the weekend, Norris found it difficult to extract out-and-out pace from the MCL40.
But that doesn’t mean Norris is writing off his F1 title defence just yet. Norris currently sits a mammoth 98 points behind championship leader Andrea Kimi Antonelli after the 19-year-old won his fifth-consecutive race of 2026, at Monaco.
“I have to [believe in the World Championship]. Max came back from that much last year, so I never want to rule it out,” he added.
“[But] When you’re 6 tenths off in qualifying around Monaco, it’s hard to find too many positives from that.”
The Briton highlighted how the McLaren’s package has been highly inconsistent in terms of performance from track-to-track.
The last couple of years had seen McLaren’s biggest strength be its consistency over a wide range of circuits.
“You just look back to a couple of weeks ago in Miami, we fought for a win,” Norris explained. “Probably should have won the race. The fact we can go from almost winning a race against the Mercedes to being so far off is pretty crazy.”
Norris, therefore, urged the team to “understand how we can develop the car” to achieve this consistency.
“It shows that the car works quite specifically in certain scenarios and clearly not in others,” he concluded.
“So the team need to understand this, we need to understand how we can develop the car more well-rounded, like the Mercedes is proving to be. For now we just have to keep working, that’s all we can do.”
McLaren and Norris now have to focus on the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, next weekend, for the Barcelona Grand Prix.
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