Norris hopeful straight-line-speed issue will ease in Singapore

Lando Norris is hopeful a straight-line-speed issue he has encountered in recent races will ease in Singapore, but said on Thursday that he needs to drive before he can judge. At Marina Bay, he said he and McLaren had underperformed against the level they wanted and needed to do better.

The downturn at Baku and Sepang followed a strong run. Across the four 2026 rounds before those events—Budapest, Zandvoort, Monza and Madrid—Norris took three of four pole positions and won twice. Neither Norris nor Oscar Piastri reached the podium at Baku or Sepang. Norris named straight-line speed, other issues he had experienced with the car and unlocking more performance among his lessons from Sepang, but did not go into technical specifics.

In comments reported by RacingNews365, team principal Andrea Stella described a straight-line-speed deficit on Norris’s car of probably 1–2 km/h. Stella estimated a lap-time loss of more than one-tenth of a second, possibly between one and two tenths of a second. He said the root cause was still under investigation and that McLaren was not pointing to the power unit.

Norris said the issue had cost him two or three positions in the last two qualifying sessions, while acknowledging there were things he could do better. He was 0.308 seconds behind Oscar Piastri in Baku qualifying and 0.005 seconds ahead in Sepang.

Norris expects the issue to be less detrimental at Marina Bay, where he said straight-line speed is less important than at the previous few venues. McLaren enters the Singapore weekend third in the Teams’ Championship on 316 points, 18 ahead of Red Bull.