The reigning champion will start eighth in the principality, his worst qualifying of the season. "The car is very difficult to drive, it's not docile, it doesn't forgive," he stated.
McLaren has received a reality check in Monaco, Lando Norris will start from eighth position in the principality, his worst qualifying of the season, and acknowledged that he was already expecting a complicated weekend because the MCL40 is "very difficult to drive" and does not instill the necessary confidence to attack on a circuit where the margin for error is non-existent.
"I think there's just a slight difference of opinion, obviously I'm the one driving the car, so I can notice the difficulty in extracting lap time" declared the Briton.
Norris's 2026 season is shaping up to be the most disappointing for a defending champion since Sebastian Vettel's catastrophic year in 2014, although while the German's nightmare was defined by an uncompetitive Renault engine, McLaren's ordeal has been an accumulation of small frustrations, a chassis effective enough to win the Miami sprint but hampered by a lack of feel from the front end and the presence of mysterious electrical problems that have affected performance on several occasions.
The MCL40's inability to instill confidence in its drivers relegated Norris and Oscar Piastri to the fourth row of the grid, more than half a second behind Kimi Antonelli's Mercedes who took pole.
Andrea Stella, team principal, had said in Canada that the car was reasonably strong in slow corners and that good performance could be expected in Monaco, but Norris's expectations were very different and reality has proven him right. "I didn't have high hopes for this weekend, the car is just very difficult to drive, it's not very docile, it doesn't forgive at all, my confidence level last year was 100, now it's 85, and in Monaco you need to be at 100" explained the reigning champion.
Norris also referred to the difference in perspective between him and the engineers, a recurring problem in a car that has great theoretical potential in terms of lap time but which drivers find difficult to access that performance: "You're always trying to push the car to the limit in every aspect, it's just that our limit is here and theirs is slightly above, we have problems with some attributes, with front locking and the front end of the car just not working very well, but this is something with the car, not with the tires, and we need to work on it" concluded Norris.
Eighth place on the grid is a hard blow for McLaren's aspirations on a circuit where overtaking is practically impossible, and Norris will have to wait for the race to bring some incident or an alternative strategy to be able to climb positions and score valuable points.
