Shanghai International Circuit, Friday, 13 March

Find out what happened during FP1 and Sprint Qualifying in Shanghai, and get the thoughts of McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, as well as Technical Director - Engineering, Neil Houdley.

A progressive first day for the McLaren Mastercard F1 Team at the Shanghai International Circuit concluded with Lando qualifying P3 and Oscar P5 for tomorrow’s first Sprint race of the 2026 season. With only a single practice session available, it was imperative to hit the ground running this morning. The team had a positive hour of practice, with Lando and Oscar completing their short and long run programmes. This played an important role in allowing the team to gather further learning and more clarity on understanding the power unit and overall car setup. There were further indications of improvements throughout this afternoon’s Sprint Qualifying with both cars recording stronger lap times in each session, ultimately finishing in front of Ferrari but behind Mercedes, who currently lead the way at this stage of the season. McLaren Mastercard are satisfied with Lando and Oscar’s final positions, and the consensus on the pit wall is that a lot of hard work over the last week has moved the team closer to the leaders at this circuit; however, a substantial gap to the front of the field remains. The task this evening will be to consolidate this learning even further with the aim of finishing strongly with good points in Saturday’s Sprint race ahead of tomorrow’s Chinese Grand Prix Qualifying session. Also in action at the Shanghai International Circuit are McLaren Driver Development Programme drivers Ella Lloyd and Ella Stevens, as they completed their first F1 Academy Qualifying session of the season. Lloyd crossed the line tenth fastest with a 2:05.009 lap, while rookie Stevens qualified in P11 with a lap time of 2:05.014.

“A positive Sprint Quali, I’m pleased with the lap and P3 is as good as we could have achieved today. To be ahead of both Ferraris is positive, I wasn’t sure that would be possible after FP1. Tomorrow we’ll do what we can to maximise our result in the Sprint race. The first lap is the best opportunity for overtaking, but we know the competition are strong, and then we’ll turn our attention to Qualifying in the afternoon.”

"A decent Sprint Qualifying. We executed a good session, the car felt pretty good and everything was smooth. There is still a big gap to Mercedes, so we need to work out how we can maximise our performance even more ahead of the Sprint and Grand Prix Qualifying tomorrow. Let’s see what we can do.”

Neil Houldey

Technical Director – Engineering

“The entire team have put in a lot of work both at the factory and trackside after the last event to maximise the car's performance this weekend in China. It was pleasing to see that we made some progress between Free Practice 1 and Sprint Qualifying today, benefitting from the important changes we made in both our deployment and car setup. “While we appeared to be the third quickest team in the opening stages of Sprint Quali, our drivers really delivered in the SQ3 session to extract the performance potential from the MCL40. “We recognise that the next few months will still require intense hard work, and we're absolutely ready to rise to that challenge, but for the opening day of running in Shanghai, there are definitely positives to take away. We're pleased with today’s result, and we’ll review everything overnight to focus on making further developments as we still have plenty of competitive sessions ahead of us this weekend.”