Lando Norris has barely sat back down at McLaren and he’s already telling everyone to forget what they know.
Back at the McLaren Technology Centre for his first proper days of 2026 prep, Norris has been pounding around the simulator and coming away with a clear message: the new era is going to feel nothing like the last one.
“It’s a completely new season,” he said in a video released by McLaren. “You kind of have to forget everything — not some things, but most things. You’ve got to throw it out the window because it’s a fresh slate, a clean piece of paper for everyone.”
This is the tone across the paddock as F1 heads into its regulation reset. The 2026 cars will be shorter, slimmer and lighter, with narrower tyres and significantly greater electrical power and deployment. Pair that with an expanded 22-car grid and a new team entering the championship, and you’ve got a wholesale rewrite of the rulebook that will force drivers to retrain their hands, feet and instincts.
Norris is already deep in that process.
“I’m back,” he smiled. “It’s my second day already. Been on the sim today, been on the sim yesterday — plenty of new things, new questions, new challenges, new bits and bobs and things I’ve got to remember. We’re doing our best to make sure we’re as prepared as we can.”
Drivers live and die by feel, and the early sim runs are often where a season’s first truths land. More battery deployment changes how and when the power arrives. Different car proportions change sightlines and weight transfer. Narrower tyres reshape the window for braking and rotation. It’s the kind of shift that can make last year’s references a trap.
“Many more challenges,” Norris added, “but I’m excited for all of it.”
McLaren’s programme ramps up quickly from here. Norris and teammate Oscar Piastri are set for a behind-closed-doors run in Barcelona from 26–30 January to get their first taste of the new car in the real world. The team will then take the covers off its 2026 challenger on 9 February, before two three-day tests in Bahrain on 11–13 and 18–20 February. The season starts in Melbourne on 8 March — a fittingly unforgiving place to learn on the fly.
If there’s a subtext to Norris’s comments, it’s that the slate is not only fresh, it’s fickle. The teams that read the regs right and the drivers who adapt fastest will bank points before anyone else has time to fix the fundamentals. That’s historically where title tilts take root in reset years.
For McLaren, continuity helps. Norris and Piastri remain one of the sharpest pairings on the grid, and the team’s trajectory in recent seasons has been upward. The challenge now is translating that momentum into a car that plays nicely with the 2026 brief — and a driver feeling that lets Norris attack without second-guessing what the rear axle is up to.
“Testing’s at the end of the month already, so it’s coming along quickly,” Norris said. “But yeah, I’m excited.”
Most of the paddock will be pretending calm as the calendar tightens. Underneath, it’s a scramble: engineers reworking fundamentals, drivers rebuilding muscle memory, and simulators running around the clock. The first time everyone rolls out in Bahrain, we’ll get the usual mirage of lap times and long-run averages. The real answers tend to arrive only when the lights go out.
Until then, believe Norris when he says you need to forget what you thought you knew. In 2026, past performance might be a poor predictor — and that, frankly, is exactly why everyone’s itching to get started.
