Lando Norris has never been one to dress up an answer for the sake of paddock theatre, and Bahrain’s first proper taste of 2026 machinery brought out that side of him again.
Pressed in the pit lane by Ted Kravitz on whether McLaren’s early deficit might simply be camouflage — the usual pre-season fog of fuel loads, engine modes and a bit of sandbagging — Norris wasn’t interested in playing along. If anything, he sounded like a driver who’s already done the mental maths and doesn’t need the working checked.
“When you do a race run, you’re full fuel, so you can’t really hide that much,” Norris said, shutting down the idea that what he’d seen was some elaborate illusion. When the suggestion came back — teams could be running light, could be hiding pace — Norris just shook his head: “No.”
That bluntness is worth listening to, because Norris wasn’t leaning on headline lap times to make his point. Mercedes topped the first official pre-season test at Sakhir with a 1-2: Kimi Antonelli quickest on a 1:33.669, 0.249s clear of George Russell. McLaren’s best lap came from Oscar Piastri with a 1:34.549. Those numbers will be chewed over, of course, but Norris’ focus was elsewhere: the stuff you can’t easily fake once the tanks are full and the laps stack up.
“We weren’t fast enough and we have a lot of work to do to try and improve,” Norris said to Sky F1. “I think we understood for the first time where we stand in terms of pace, at least compared to Ferrari, who completed a long run.
“At the moment we’re not very close to Ferrari. We’re not bad, but we’re not fast enough.”
It’s early, and nobody sensible is handing out trophies in the Bahrain paddock in February. But there’s a particular credibility to a driver calling it as he feels it after long-run running, because that’s the closest testing gets to truth serum. A qualifying sim can be theatre — a soft tyre here, a light fuel poke there — but sustained pace tends to reveal the shape of a car, the way it treats its tyres, and the baseline efficiency of the whole package.
Norris also made a point of highlighting Red Bull’s energy deployment with its new Red Bull-Ford power unit, which is a very 2026 sentence in itself. On the face of it, it’s another reminder that this season’s pecking order won’t just be about who’s nailed the aero platform; it’s going to be about who’s best at extracting and spending electrical energy across a lap without compromising everything else.
“They have a very good power unit by the looks of things,” Norris said. “They deploy and have a lot of efficiency. We need to understand how they have that.
“The Red Bulls seem to have done a very good job, and the Ford powertrain seems to be very strong. Fair play to them. But, at the minute, they’re a good step ahead of us.”
For McLaren — running Mercedes power — the subtext isn’t panic so much as clarity. Norris didn’t sound beaten; he sounded annoyed in the productive way drivers get when the reference points are suddenly sharp. The comfort blanket of “we don’t really know” doesn’t hold when you’ve sat in the car, watched the deltas on longer runs, and felt what’s missing.
And then, with typical Norris timing, he flipped the tone entirely when the conversation drifted into the paddock’s favourite pastime: making simple things complicated.
“Don’t overcomplicate Formula One,” he said. “Sometimes people aren’t that smart.”
Kravitz brought up concerns around wheel-to-wheel racing and the new cars’ bargeboards, which now stick out further than the previous generation. Norris’ response was half-joke, half-message to anyone trying to build a grand theory in week one of testing.
“You are overcomplicating stuff,” he insisted. “F1 is for dummies, the driving part is anyway. The rest of it’s for smart people. The dummies drive.”
It was a line delivered with a grin, but there’s something pointed under it. Drivers can feel when a car is good in traffic, when it’s nervous in dirty air, when it’s liable to spit out bits if you lean on it — but they’re also wary of second-guessing a whole season’s racing from one testing conversation about a bodywork element.
“I don’t know, I’m not quite that close to people,” Norris added, nodding to the fact that pre-season running rarely gives you the real combat scenarios. “I’m sure when you get to Australia, turn one, you might see some flying by then…”
So where does that leave McLaren? Not in crisis, but not in the cosy place it would’ve wanted to be either. Norris has effectively drawn an early map: Ferrari looks strong on long runs, Red Bull’s deployment and efficiency have caught the eye, and McLaren’s got “a lot of work to do” even if the gaps on a single lap are still blurred by testing noise.
The interesting part is the certainty. In a week where most drivers default to diplomatic fog, Norris is already talking like someone who thinks the stopwatch is about to become very public, very quickly — and that there’s no point pretending otherwise.
