Lando Norris finished fourth on the road at the Formula 1 Singapore Grand Prix but slammed the MCL40 for not being “quick enough” and “impossible” to drive.
After back-to-back race wins either side of the summer break, McLaren and Norris have seemingly dropped back again to the leading pack.
At the Marina Bay Street Circuit this weekend, the Briton never really had the pace to fight the likes of Max Verstappen and the Ferraris.
Norris took the chequered flag, after 62 laps on the scorching tarmac of the streets of Singapore, in fourth – a whopping 40 seconds off the race-winner Verstappen.
Looking ahead to upcoming races at Austin and Mexico, Norris believes the Woking-based team are a “long way off” the pace to expect any chance of success.
“The car is not quick enough and it’s too difficult to drive. We’re a long way off,” he told media including Motorsport Week.
He revealed just how difficult it has been to drive the MCL40 off late, an experience he revealed was like driving “on a knife edge on every single corner.”
“You’ve just got to drive it within an exact percent and you have to force the car in every single way. You can’t let the car do any work,” he added.
“You can’t just let the front do the work or the rear do the work. You have to force the front. You’ve got to force the rear.”
Lando Norris: F1 success “impossible” in 2026 for McLaren
Norris lay into how the MCL40 has been treating him so far in the second half of the 2026 season.
The reigning F1 World Champion expressed his anguish that nothing he can do in the cockpit will change the fact that the car is just not “quick enough”.
“You’ve got to drive it in a way that takes so much concentration and so much ability,” Norris explained.
“It’s just so long and mentally draining because of how hard you have to work behind the wheel.
“So it’s just too difficult and it makes it impossible to put laps together in qualifying which just show how good of a job we were able to do when we were getting on pole and things like that and how rewarding that felt.
“But with it not being quick enough now it’s just it’s too difficult and you can’t do anything magical because you’re simply not quick enough.
“You have to force the car and you can’t let the car do any work because it doesn’t do it on its own and that’s not what you want from a car at all.”
Norris sits sixth in the drivers’ standings heading into the race weekend at the Circuit of the Americas.
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