Lando Norris’ first proper look at the World Drivers’ Championship trophy came in the slightly surreal setting of the FIA’s end-of-season gala on December 12. Suits, stage lights, polite applause — and the not-so-small matter of the No.1 plate now belonging to a McLaren driver again.
The question hanging over 2026 isn’t whether Norris is good enough to go again. Anyone who watched 2025 unfold already knows the answer to that. It’s whether McLaren can carry its edge through a hard reset without losing the fine margins that made Norris champion in the first place — and whether the team’s much-vaunted “papaya rules” approach leaves them exposed when the sport demands ruthless clarity.
There’s a reason F1 folk have always treated a maiden title defence as a trapdoor season. History isn’t kind to drivers — especially British ones — who try to immediately back up a first crown. Lewis Hamilton had to wait years before he added a second. Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart didn’t go back-to-back straight after their first either. The pattern isn’t some mystical “curse”; it’s that the first title is often won at the peak of a cycle, and the next year is where reality reasserts itself.
If Norris wants a cautionary tale that feels uncomfortably relevant, he only has to revisit Hamilton’s 2009. Fresh from his breakthrough 2008 championship, Hamilton arrived to a year of sweeping rule changes and found McLaren on the wrong side of them. The car lacked downforce, balance and pace — the trio of sins that turn a champion into a weekly damage-limitation merchant. Brawn GP got out of the blocks early and turned half a season into an uncatchable advantage.
That memory matters because the same basic risk is sitting in McLaren’s inbox for 2026: take the momentum of a dominant year and translate it into a new era without losing the fundamentals. You can have the best driver pairing, the best operations, the best morale in the pitlane — and still spend six months chasing a misread of the rulebook.
McLaren fans will point out, fairly, that this squad looks more robust than the versions that stumbled in previous resets. Norris isn’t a new arrival trying to bend the team around him, either; he’s the product of the system, embedded in it, fluent in its language. That counts. So does the fact Oscar Piastri was strong enough in 2025 to take third overall, which says the performance wasn’t a one-driver mirage.
But it cuts both ways. When you’ve got two genuine front-runners and a policy designed to keep the playing field level internally, you can also end up without a clear Plan A when the title fight tightens. Red Bull’s modern dynasty showed how brutally effective it is when a team builds a car concept and a campaign around one spearhead. Sebastian Vettel’s four straight titles and Max Verstappen’s run from 2021 to 2024 didn’t happen in a vacuum; they happened with an organisation comfortable making sharp calls and living with them.
McLaren’s current philosophy is more idealistic — and, in many ways, more modern — but a regulation reset can stress-test that idealism. When development directions fork, when one driver’s feedback is pushing one way and the other is nudging the opposite, “equal treatment” stops being a slogan and becomes a performance question.
Jenson Button’s 2010 is another reminder of how quickly the ground can shift. He arrived at McLaren trying to defend the title he’d just won, only for the sport to move underneath him with a changed car and an inconsistent season that never quite turned into a proper championship assault. Podiums were plentiful; wins weren’t. Meanwhile the likes of Sebastian Vettel and Fernando Alonso were collecting the kind of results that actually decide titles.
For McLaren, that era also underlined an uncomfortable truth: the team has not always been the quickest adapter when the regulations are turned upside down. The last time a McLaren driver won their first championship and immediately defended it the following year, you’re going all the way back to Mika Häkkinen’s 1998-99 run. That’s not a stat to fear, but it is one to respect.
Norris, at least, enters 2026 with advantages Button didn’t have at that moment: continuity, trust, and the confidence of being the reigning champion rather than the new guy walking into someone else’s culture. Yet the core challenge remains the same. The sport is about to reward the teams that interpret the new landscape fastest — and punish the ones who arrive with yesterday’s answers.
So no, this isn’t really about Britain producing drivers who can’t go back-to-back. It’s about whether McLaren can be the version of itself that wins titles in an established rule cycle and still be the version that nails the first swing of a new one. That’s the real defence Norris is facing.
And if 2025 proved anything, it’s that Norris doesn’t need a perfect season to win — he needs a McLaren that’s sharp enough, decisive enough, and technically right often enough. If they give him that again in 2026, the history books are there to be rewritten. If they don’t, he’ll learn what every new champion eventually learns: the hardest title to win is the one immediately after the first.
