Lando Norris doesn’t sound like a man expecting Monaco to reward the same order we’ve seen at the front of 2026 so far.
After Montreal, where Mercedes again had the pace to frame the weekend and keep its qualifying stranglehold intact, Norris was already looking ahead to the one place where lap time is manufactured very differently. Monaco, he argued, is precisely the sort of circuit that can expose what a car is and isn’t good at — and in his view that plays straight into Ferrari’s hands.
“I think Monaco again is another track that’s very different,” Norris said. “So, you know, I think to really wait and see how we’re going to be in Barcelona is something I’m excited for.
“Monaco was also a track that was decent to us last year. Honestly, I think the Ferrari will be on pole next weekend in Monaco, their low speed performance is far better than everyone else.”
It’s an interesting call given how the season has started: Mercedes drivers have owned pole across the opening five races, turning Saturday into a private contest inside the Brackley garage. But Monaco has a habit of ending neat streaks because it’s not a “best car wins” track in the conventional sense. It’s a compliance-and-rotation circuit; it’s about putting energy into the tyre without sliding it to death; it’s about confidence on the brake release and a front end that doesn’t ask questions mid-corner.
In other words, it’s exactly where Norris thinks the Ferrari SF-26’s low-speed trait will become decisive. And he didn’t frame it as a vague “they’ll be quick” prediction — he put names on it. Norris expects it to be either Charles Leclerc or Lewis Hamilton starting P1.
Ferrari’s recent Monaco form offers enough context for that to feel like more than paddock small talk. Leclerc has taken pole three times in the last five Monaco races, and while this year’s machinery is a different beast, the core requirement in Monte Carlo hasn’t changed: you need a car that turns, rides kerbs, and lets the driver commit early. If Ferrari has that, qualifying becomes its moment.
There’s also a subtle undercurrent in Norris’ comments: he’s not pretending McLaren is arriving with bulletproof momentum. He admitted Monaco should suit them reasonably well — he pointed out it was one of his strongest weekends last season — but he stopped well short of selling it as a win-or-bust opportunity.
“I look forward to Monaco, because Monaco, I had good success there last year, and was one of my best weekends, most exciting weekends,” he said, “but I think in the places we know we’re struggling, it’s not something that gives you confidence to say we’re going to be incredible.”
That’s a telling line from a driver who’s been close enough to Mercedes to measure the gap, but not close enough to pretend it’s closed. McLaren’s job, as Norris put it plainly, is to keep applying pressure — particularly if Mercedes has one of those Monaco weekends where the car never quite settles and the pole fight becomes a scrap rather than a formality.
“You never know, at least it was us giving the fight to Mercedes [in Montreal], so we need to keep that up, keep the pressure on,” Norris said.
The other wrinkle is whether McLaren will even run the same specification it brought to Canada. Norris cautioned there’s no guarantee the upgrades fitted in Montreal will automatically carry over to Monaco, partly because the track’s peculiar demands can mask or distort the gains you’d expect elsewhere.
“I think Monaco is still… you never see so many of the upgrades, and it’s hard to exploit them to the same potential,” he said. “Difficult to know [if upgrades will stay], we’ve just got to make sure it works properly next time, so it’s not a guarantee we’re going to run in Monaco, but we all will do tests, see if we can make it work better.”
That’s as honest as drivers get about development in a cost-capped era: you can arrive with new parts, but if the correlation isn’t perfect or the car’s balance window narrows, you’re suddenly weighing purity of performance against predictability — and Monaco punishes indecision more than anywhere.
Norris arrives in the Principality fifth in the standings on 58 points, a hefty 73 behind Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli. In pure championship terms it’s early days, but the subtext is clear: when one team has been dictating qualifying, you circle the outliers on the calendar and you try to turn them into turning points.
Norris is betting Monaco is one of those weekends — and that Ferrari, not Mercedes, will be the one smiling on Saturday night.
