Zandvoort: Lando Norris says he and McLaren "don't have the car I need to fight for a championship," despite a second consecutive win to open the second half of the Formula 1 season. The Briton's victory in the final Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, following on from his first win of the season in Hungary last month, was of the highest calibre. As such, it raises the prospect of the sort of championship fightback staged by Red Bull's Max Verstappen against Norris himself last year.

According to BBC, after this race last year, Norris's team-mate Oscar Piastri had a 34-point advantage over the Briton and 104 over Verstappen. Yet Verstappen, after one of the all-time great fightbacks, finished the season just two points behind Norris as he won the title in Abu Dhabi. Norris's masterful victory in Zandvoort has left him 83 points off the lead, held by Mercedes' Kimi Antonelli, who he and McLaren passed on track after losing the lead at the chaotic start of the day.

Antonelli's team-mate George Russell is tied on points with Ferrari's Lewis Hamilton, 59 behind the Italian. But while McLaren have made a major step forward with upgrades to their car that led to convincing wins in both Hungary and now the Netherlands, Norris believes that the car still has too many flaws to mount the sort of consistent attack Verstappen produced last year. "I'm confident because we clearly have a strong car," he said. "We have a strong car in certain areas. It's not like last year where we were pretty good everywhere."

Norris's belief is based on his understanding that McLaren's slow-speed performance will be a handicap at the next race in Monza, and two races after that in Azerbaijan. Both tracks are dominated by long straights, which penalise the McLaren's high drag compared to Mercedes, and have very few high-speed corners where the car's strength can compensate for its weaknesses in slow turns. McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said: "If we can confirm our improvements in Monza, then we can look with some optimism at the remainder of the season."

Norris's victory in Zandvoort, built around an offset strategy and devastating pace once the cars were on the hard tyres in the second stint, underlined the level at which he is now operating. As impressive as Verstappen's revival was last year, Norris's own in the second half of the season was almost as good, as both made up ground on Piastri. And Norris believes he has built on the progress he made in his driving after a difficult start to 2025 to perform on an even higher plane in 2026.

"I was driving at a high level the second half of last year," he said. "It's tough to say, but I do think it's a trickier car to drive this year in some ways. And I think you can see that because the gaps between team-mates are often bigger this year, I would say, than it was last year." Team principal Andrea Stella said he believed Norris was driving better than ever. "Lando is driving and operating at a very high level," Stella said. "He's driving at the level of a world champion."

McLaren's progress has come in the context of stagnation at Mercedes, whose lack of an upgrade to their car since Canada in May has led to them being caught by McLaren and Ferrari, a situation that has raised eyebrows among rival teams. The next Mercedes upgrade is not due until the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia in four races' time. For Antonelli—who also faces a grid penalty at his home race in Italy next time out because he needs to take a new engine that exceeds his allowance as a consequence of early-season reliability problems—it cannot come soon enough.