The reigning constructors' champions spent 2025 winning almost everything. Nine rounds into 2026 they are chasing, and for the first time in two years the words coming out of Woking are about damage limitation rather than domination. Lando Norris put a number on the deficit that has since become McLaren's internal shorthand: three months.
"We're like two, three months behind. That's not one upgrade; that's a lot of bits," Norris told Sky Sports. He was blunt about what closing that gap actually requires. "One good upgrade, no. We need three, four, five, but it depends," he said, before setting a realistic horizon: "I don't think we're going to be quickest anytime soon but hopefully over the next three, four, five months we can catch up and we can narrow the gap to be on pace with them."
Team principal Andrea Stella frames the deficit in the same terms, and is careful to define what three months means in development currency. "This couple of months is the delay that we have at the moment. We see that it's probably two, three months, the space between which we see upgrades from the top teams," Stella explained to The Race. Speaking to grandprix.com, he put a lap-time figure on it: "We're probably 3-4 tenths off the top, the numbers are pretty clear, but we know exactly what to do."
The technical picture behind the gap is specific rather than mysterious. Under the 2026 rules McLaren locked into a car that is draggy on the straights and short of downforce relative to Mercedes, struggles to switch its tyres on in cold conditions, and runs an older power-unit specification than the works Mercedes cars. Stella has conceded the team took conceptual directions early in development that it is now unwinding as it learns more about the regulations.
Where the drivers and the pit wall diverge is tone. Norris has not hidden his discomfort in the cockpit, calling the McLaren "maybe one of the hardest cars I've ever driven in Formula 1" and marvelling that "there's no way we can finish P2 in Miami and have a car like this today." Oscar Piastri points to the same fragility under pressure. "When everything is just a little bit out of our comfort zone we seem to struggle," he said.
Stella, by contrast, is projecting calm. "I'm not the least bit worried, I know our ability to react," he told grandprix.com, casting Mercedes' relentless updates as a challenge to be matched rather than feared. "They bring something new to every grand prix. It's a battle of innovation."
McLaren's own timeline expects the first meaningful gains before the summer break, with the more substantial upgrades landing afterwards. Whether three, four, five months of parts is enough to overhaul a Mercedes team that keeps developing is the question that will define the second half of McLaren's title defence, and most likely whether Norris and Piastri are fighting for wins again before the season is out.
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*Originally published on [Formula One News](https://newsformula.one/article/mclaren-admits-its-three-months-behind-mercedes-in-2026). Visit for full coverage.*