22 September 2026 15:00 (UTC)
Cooler, calmer and even more confident, Lando is approaching racing as the best version of himself yet, and he reckons there’s still more to come
When Lando Norris crossed the finish line to win this year’s Hungarian Grand Prix, the celebrations that followed were understandably ecstatic. The team’s first win of 2026, Lando’s first as an F1 Champion and his first since last year’s São Paulo Grand Prix were all cause for an explosion of emotion – on the pit wall, in the garage, but most of all in the cockpit.
“My pace today was probably some of the best pace I’ve ever had,” said Lando in parc fermé after the race. “The car was beautiful to drive, and I felt very confident. I’m just happy to be back and see the number one again.”
But alongside Lando’s joy in returning to the top step of the podium and the satisfaction of delivering a win that validated the hard work put in by the whole team to develop the MCL40’s raw potential into race-winning form, another feeling was strongly evident – a sense of calm that might have been absent a couple of years ago. It was the same just a few weeks later, when he won the following race in Zandvoort, immediately after the summer break.
This was not the same Lando who had spent years growing with McLaren to chase his first victory, carrying the weight of expectation into every opportunity and wondering whether the next chance would finally be the one. This was a World Champion who had already experienced the most intense pressure Formula 1 can create and had learned how to channel its beneficial effects into purer performance and to discard the rest.
“I think after a few races this season I realised that I just feel a little bit calmer, a little bit more relaxed,” Lando says of racing as a Champion in 2026. “I think deep down winning the title just kind of gives you that extra strength every time, like any moment it got a little bit tough so far this season or I kind of struggled or needed to improve, I always felt like I definitely could.
“My underlying level of confidence has improved. I may be a little bit more relaxed, but I feel in some ways even more focused on knowing exactly what I need to do, and that's a good thing. So, I feel like I can almost enjoy everything even more. But I still feel very focused. I probably feel a little bit more confident than I did last season because of what happened at the end of last year.”
That confidence does not come from the title alone. It comes from knowing what it took to get there: a series of mindset shifts that began with the understanding that winning would not come through the alignment of particular stars, but as a result of capability, belief and execution.
“I’m very much a guy who has to see something to believe it,” Lando said ahead of this season. “Did I believe I could be on Pole for the first time or win a race? Only when I’ve done it, then I’ve gone, ‘Ah, I can do it.’”
That was very much in evidence at the 2024 Miami Grand Prix. Benefiting from a mid-race Safety Car, Lando jumped ahead of Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and powered to a convincing victory, seven seconds clear of the four-time Champion Dutchman.
For Lando, his first career win unlocked a new perspective – doubt was banished and in its place was the assuredness that not only was victory possible, it was repeatable.
“It makes you relax a little bit more,” he said afterwards. “It’s not like, ‘Is this going to be the one? Can I do it today?’ It’s, ‘I did it last week, I did it a couple of months ago, I can do it again.’ You get rid of the little voice that’s like, ‘Don’t mess it up now!’”
Three more wins followed, in the Netherlands, Singapore and Abu Dhabi, and, allied to wins for Oscar Piastri in Hungary and Azerbaijan, the performance lifted the team to its first Constructors’ Championship crown since 1998.
The team title was more evidence that the ultimate prize was attainable and, over team radio on the cool-down lap in Abu Dhabi, Lando signed off with: “Next year's going to be my year too.”
And at the start of 2025, Lando hit the ground running. A stellar weekend in Melbourne saw him take a fifth career win and he led the Championship for the first time in his career. However, though he banked five podiums from the next six races, Oscar racked up four wins during the same period to take a 13-point title lead.
Lando took a stunning win in Monaco to reignite his title charge, but a miscalculated overtaking move on his team-mate in Montreal led to both McLarens exiting the race. It was a pivotal moment. Lando banked P1 in Austria and took an emotional home win at Silverstone, but momentum was elusive and, when a technical issue forced him to retire from P2 in the Dutch Grand Prix with just nine laps remaining, a 34-point gap to race winner Oscar suddenly looked like a chasm.
It prompted a sea change in how Lando approached the second half of the season.
“I had to step up what I was doing away from the track,” he said at the end of last year. “I added more people to the group I was working with. I had to work harder both on the simulator and at track. I had to dig deep and try and understand more things quicker and in a more advanced way than I ever have before. That’s what gave me the advantage.”
The pressure intensified as Verstappen joined the title fight, but a pair of wins, in Mexico City and São Paulo, and four other podiums saw Lando take the title by two points.
Looking back now, Lando says that, apart from having self-belief, the strongest takeaway from 2025 was learning to accept setbacks.
“Knowing that at any point you can have bad moments, bad weekends, a bad run of results and still push through and come out strong on the other side is very important,” he explains. “It’s about being willing to accept losses, accept that other people are doing better than you at times. It’s about deep down knowing that you can still do better than them and knowing that you can come back from defeat or overcome a challenge. It’s having that belief and confidence that you'll be able to get back to where you want to be as an individual or as a team.”
It’s a lesson that has been front and centre of Lando’s mindset this season. The new regulations for 2026 have resulted in a car that both Lando and Oscar have at times found difficult to tame, and over the opening half of the season, results were hard to come by. But for the defending Champion, the mindset can’t be ‘why us’, but ‘where next’.
“The thing is to remind everyone of what we've achieved over the last couple years, reminding them of who they are, what they're capable of doing,” he insists. “It’s very important to give the team confidence and give them reassurance, motivate them, because now we all know and everyone in the team should know that we're very capable of winning races, even when things don't start in the best way possible.”
The rewards of that outlook are clear. Third in Barcelona, a six-place gain from grid penalties in Belgium to finish seventh at the Flag, and then Pole and victory in Hungary. He won from Pole again in the Netherlands, and took a fifth podium of the season in Spain, only missing out on victory from Pole due to an ill-timed Virtual Safety Car.
The MCL40 is growing in stature, and Lando is confident that, if the machinery is willing, he’ll deliver.
And as the development of the MCL40 continues apace, that sometimes means digging deep and finding success in areas other than at the top of the podium.
“For me, it’s focusing on maximising every weekend,” he says. “That doesn't mean a win, or a P2 or a P3, sometimes it’s just maximising a P5 or a P4 or a top 10 even – maximising the points that are possible and staying realistic. Although it hurts a little bit to not always say ‘let's get P1’, I think being realistic is an important thing.”
However honest Lando and the team are about immediate expectations, the pressure on a title-defending driver and team is intense. And whereas in the past Lando might have pushed too hard to deliver in difficult moments, he’s now learned how to direct the pressure in the most positive way.
“How you deal with pressure improves with time in the sport,” he says. “I still feel the pressure, but now it’s the pressure of the whole team relying on me. I want to perform well for the team and get points or win the race. But I deal with it all in a much better way.
“That’s come with experience and just having confidence in myself, knowing that I'm going to go out and do a good job,” he adds. “I like it when I have the pressure of ‘okay, now is my time to go out and get pole, or now is my time to go and get a race win’. That's a good kind of pressure.”
Focusing on attainable goals and resisting the pressure to deliver beyond that are also important to Lando in another regard – separating identity from results.
“You always have to separate your results and your self-worth. Also, having people around you that can advise you and direct you at the same time is important. I'm always the first one to kind of take it on the chin and say if I've done a bad job. But I also then have a very good team of people around me that will either say I've done a good job, but maybe I didn't believe I did or even if I thought I did have a good result, they're the ones that are like, we could have done better here, we could have done better there. I think the self-worth part is now very easy.”
Confidence in victory, belief in the ultimate goal, resilience through tough times, and the ability to channel pressure away from expectation and into performance. Stack the lessons of the past two years together and a title-winning mindset emerges. For Lando, the lessons of race victories, a Championship win and a reset in goals have also given him a deeper understanding of what it takes to stay at the front in F1.
“I think if someone who worked with me early in my career spent a race weekend with me today, one of the biggest things they’d notice would probably be how much more composed I am,” he says.
“In my first season of Formula 1, I felt so overwhelmed, with so much information and so many things to think about. I still feel all of those things, but I can deal with them in a much better way.
“I know a lot more about what I want and what I don't want. Not in an arrogant way, but I know what information is useful to me and what is less useful. I'm just more decisive in knowing what can get the best out of me.”
And the best, he feels, is still to come.
“I still want to win more,” he says. “Everybody's greedy in life, especially when you enjoy something. You always want more of it. That's the same with winning races and the same with winning championships. I also want to win for the team. It's always much more exciting when you come back to the factory, and you see everyone with some champagne and the trophies in the front. So, my team is my motivation.”
