Why becoming a world champion for the first time has its own pressures

Becoming a first-time Formula 1 champion presents something of a dichotomy, one that Lando Norris is currently experiencing. The pressure to become a champion is now gone, and Norris has basked in his status with a spring in his step.  

After being typecast as the paddock butterfingers, as someone with a penchant for spilling away wins and pole positions under the pressure of having to perform, Norris is much more zen these days. He’s won a title, after all, and the biggest millstone around his neck has been lifted. The only thing left to do is… well, to win more titles.

And in that lies the second half of that dichotomy: Norris is now sensing the pressure to defend his championship to the hilt, even if that looks somewhat unlikely at this stage of the year since McLaren’s season hasn’t really got going.

The final run-in at the end of 2025 was the culmination of several plots. First, there was the arduous road that McLaren had taken back to the top of F1 after a barren few years, plus the end of the Red Bull/Max Verstappen hegemony, and Norris’s growing confidence in the face of incredible pressure. The spectre of the Honda years, and of the flaws often associated with Norris’s driving, were jettisoned into the night sky when the Abu Dhabi GP finale reached its conclusion.

After the Woking squad had atoned for a dismal start to the 2023 season with a change in development direction, the team had rocketed from somewhere near the back of the field to leading it, concluding with its easy romp to last year’s constructors’ championship and Norris’s more tortured road to the championship as Verstappen threatened to crash McLaren’s party.  

Regardless, Norris prevailed – and ultimately did it in his own way. It was said that Norris tended to wilt when facing up to Verstappen in hand-to-hand combat. Those fights have toughened Norris up a bit and given him the wherewithal to stand his ground, especially when a certain blue-and-yellow car starts to loom larger in his mirrors.

Title win lifted the immediate pressure from Norris’s shoulders

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Sutton Images via Getty Images

Moving into 2026, Norris perhaps hoped that the adage ‘the first title is the hardest one to win’ would prove to be true. But such has been the form of Mercedes, compared to the issues that McLaren has faced this year, that a second title on the spin looks out of reach for Norris for the time being. McLaren’s recent momentum has hit something of a plateau this year, and progress with its MCL40 has been hamstrung through the opening rounds.

Reliability, particularly with regards to the power unit, has been the biggest issue to overcome thus far. Two separate battery problems before the Chinese GP precluded both McLaren drivers from starting the race, and Norris has borne the brunt of those gremlins in recent rounds. One glitch sat at McLaren’s door when Norris’s gearbox crunched its last in Montreal, but a battery shutdown and an engine misfire across the Monaco weekend was very much of a Mercedes nature.  

Norris is confident that the bulk of the technical dramas can be solved in good time to enact a recovery through the middle part of the season, but the MCL40 needs a considerable step forward in terms of reliability to get there – and from that point, performance will follow.

“The season is long and we can come from a points deficit through the middle of the year to the end of the year and hopefully finish strong and be able to fight” Lando Norris

“The season is long and we can come from a points deficit through the middle of the year to the end of the year and hopefully finish strong and be able to fight,” he reasons. “But when you have things that keep going wrong, you cannot build confidence in the car, you cannot try things.”

It’s an awkward situation that leaves McLaren walking on eggshells in addressing those issues, given that most of them are outside its control. Team principal Andrea Stella has been deliberate in phrasing his sentiments to avoid throwing Mercedes’ High Performance Powertrains division under the bus.  

In any case, the reliability snafus leave Norris needing a streak of wins and a monsoon of misfortune chez Mercedes if there’s to be anything more than a pipedream of retaining the title. The Briton, however, refuses to give up just yet.

One that got away: Norris rues missing Miami victory opportunity

Photo by: Sona Maleterova / Getty Images

“I think just because I still believe we can win, I still believe, and we should have won in Miami, so the fact that we could have won a race this year just on pure pace and because we could have deserved it, that still gives me plenty of hope,” Norris explains. “I think it’s just the downforce, the unreliability we’ve had has hurt a lot. Monaco I think was a bit of an extra, because we struggled a lot.

“I don’t think the title is impossible; saying it makes it feel like it starts to be more impossible, but I will still believe for as long as possible that it’s still on the cards. I still believe as a team we can turn things around and make progress, but we’re also against a team and a driver at the minute that’s just dominating, that’s not making mistakes, that’s getting everything right. A driver that’s doing an unbelievable job, and it’s hard to have a lot of confidence if you’re up against someone like that.

“I think the thing that gives us confidence is still Miami and Canada, we still had two decent weekends on pace, so I think the hope is still there, the belief is still there. We’re still excited just to try and get some podiums going again [achieved at the Barcelona GP since speaking to Autosport – ed], that excites us at the minute and I’m still excited for us to get back to winning because I think it’s still possible.”

Apart from reliability, or the occasional lack thereof, McLaren is missing a little bit of downforce versus the likes of Mercedes – and potentially Ferrari too, which has a great car but a power unit lacking in outright grunt. Stella confirms that this year’s MCL40 needs a bit more grip, but the team is not necessarily willing to give up some of its progress on being “gentle” with the tyres. This characteristic is perhaps another reason why McLaren struggled in qualifying at Monaco: it couldn’t generate enough heat around the array of short-radius, low-speed corners, and neither could it handle the combined braking zones around the street course.

Norris’s assertion that Miami was there for the taking was correct, had he not been undercut by Kimi Antonelli during the sole pitstop phase. He’d already done the difficult part of clearing Antonelli and early leader Charles Leclerc and had led pretty comfortably from the Mercedes driver, but pitting one lap later ultimately cost Norris the lead. Antonelli was able to ease past among the sweepers that open the lap, and Norris wasn’t able to provide a riposte over the following tours.  

The sprint win was of some small consolation to Norris, McLaren demonstrating a glimmer of promise with its 1-2 finish in the shorter Saturday race. It also allowed Norris to get one over his team-mate, at least in a scenario where neither driver was having to nurse a problem, as McLaren’s updates appeared to pay off.  

Norris seized his chance to win at a wet-dry Silverstone last year

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Sutton Images via Getty Images

It’s fair to say that over the course of the opening races, Norris and Piastri have once again been evenly matched. There was a perception that, as Piastri grew in experience, he would eventually begin to prise open an advantage over Norris – although the Australian demonstrated the opposite towards the end of last year when his title challenge ran aground, and Norris took the initiative.

Both have opened 2026 on an equal footing, for better or for worse. Piastri failed to start the opening two races, while Norris did likewise in China and then suffered reliability issues in Canada and Monaco. But the quality of the drivers has seldom been in doubt; when the car has worked, both drivers have been able to reach the podium and occasionally interlope between the two Mercedes, as seen at Suzuka and in Miami. 

When considering McLaren’s current stature in 2026, it would be reasonable to assume that Norris will find the task of matching last year’s British GP victory tough. That said, the Bristol-born driver enjoyed a healthy slice of fortune en route to last year’s win: both Piastri and Verstappen made misjudgements behind the safety car, one backing up the pack too violently (and forcing some of the cars behind to take evasive action), the other slipping off the road in the rain.  

Norris returns to the scene of his triumph as a champion, and with the express goal of helping to raise the rafters around his eponymous grandstand

But you’ve got to take the opportunities when they arise, and Norris duly did so when it came to the crunch in a wet-dry Silverstone race. Even the heavy rain clouds could not dim the fluorescent yellow Lando Stand at Stowe Corner, but it became much brighter as the worst of the weather had finally lifted and a dramatic race drew to a close.  

This time, Norris returns to the scene of his triumph as a champion, and with the express goal of helping to raise the rafters around his eponymous grandstand. He’ll need something to go his way again this year, but luck has not been in abundance for Norris so far in 2026.

The Red Bull Ring-Silverstone double-header has been a turning point for Norris before; the 2023 updates presented a seismic shift through the pecking order, which changed McLaren’s year, while confidence-boosting wins at both races in 2025 reignited Norris’s championship charge. It would be fitting if the two rounds in Austria and the UK could yield a similar turnaround in fortunes…

This article is one of many in the monthly Autosport magazine. For more premium content, take a look at the August 2026 issue and subscribe today.

Norris will require a substantial slice of luck to reward the home fans for a second year in a row

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