A rediscovered champion
From the Hungarian GP onwards, also taking advantage of the updates brought by McLaren on the MCL40, Lando Norris has returned to being an absolute protagonist in the top positions of the grid. The Englishman from Budapest onwards has won two GPs out of the four held, limited the damage in Monza with a good fourth place, and in Madrid he finished third in a race he would almost certainly have won without the unfortunate timing of the Virtual Safety Car entry, which served Kimi Antonelli on a silver platter the eighth victory of 2026. To these results must be added an impressive leap in level made by Norris in qualifying, with as many as three pole positions won from the Hungarian Grand Prix onwards.
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Everything goes against Lando
Not everything, however, is working perfectly in the English champion’s garage. The McLaren in fact, especially with Norris, has proven to be particularly ‘faulty’ in the execution of pit stops. In Madrid it is true that it was the VSC that deprived Norris of victory, but it was almost certainly his garage – with a pit stop lasting as long as 6.65 seconds – that deprived their #1 of second place ahead of Max Verstappen. The papaya driver in fact crossed the finish line less than a second behind the Dutchman, despite a pit stop lasting 4.31 seconds longer than that of the Red Bull driver. An eternity at this level.
The one in Madrid was not an isolated misstep by the McLaren mechanics: in the last six GPs the average pit stop time on Norris’s car has been 3.88 seconds (Mercedes, for comparison, stands at 2.56 seconds) and only 3 pit stops out of 10 were executed in less than three seconds.
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In the seasonal pit stop ranking McLaren is only sixth and is the worst among the four top teams. A clear step back for the team led by Andrea Stella, which in 2025 was the second-best team on the grid in pit stop execution, behind only Ferrari. If Norris (but also Piastri) wants to have the hope of winning some more stage victories from now until the end of the World Championship, it will be necessary for the reigning world champion team to drastically reverse this very negative trend.
