NORRIS SIGNS NEW MCLAREN DEAL UNTIL AT LEAST 2030
Lando Norris has signed a new contract with McLaren that will keep him at the team until at least the end of the 2030 season. The deal also carries a multi-year option to continue beyond that date.
His previous contract was believed to run until the end of 2027, but McLaren moved early to tie him down for longer. Norris said he had no wish to look elsewhere. He admitted other teams had shown interest in him, but said he never had any interest in them. “McLaren is my home,” he said, adding that the goals he set nine years ago were to bring the team back to the front and to win championships.
The numbers behind the deal are unusual for modern Formula 1. Norris already holds the record for the longest F1 career spent entirely with one team, having started 163 Grands Prix for McLaren, more than any other driver in the team’s history. If he sees the contract through, he will have completed twelve seasons as a McLaren race driver.
So far he has taken 13 wins, 18 pole positions and 48 podiums, plus his first world title in 2025. That championship was McLaren’s first drivers’ title since Lewis Hamilton won for the team in 2008.
What makes the timing interesting is that McLaren is no longer the benchmark. The team won back-to-back constructors’ titles in 2024 and 2025, but the 2026 rules reset has changed the order. After twelve of twenty-three rounds, Mercedes leads the constructors’ championship with 425 points, ahead of Ferrari on 338 and McLaren third on 263.
Norris sits fourth in the drivers’ standings on 159 points, 83 behind leader Kimi Antonelli, with team-mate Oscar Piastri seventh on 104. In other words, Norris has committed his next five years from a weaker position than the one he was in a year ago.
He does at least arrive at the signing with momentum. The announcement came six days after he won the Dutch Grand Prix, his second victory in a row. Those two wins came either side of the summer shutdown and moved him ahead of Charles Leclerc into fourth. Eleven rounds remain, so a title defence is difficult but not yet finished.
For McLaren, the deal completes a stable driver line-up. Piastri signed his own extension last year, meaning both McLaren drivers are now contracted until at least 2028. The move also follows a wider pattern on the grid: Max Verstappen recently committed to Red Bull until 2030 as well, with teams locking in their lead drivers early rather than waiting to see how the new regulations settle. Norris’s extension is a £120million contract worth up to £30million a season, which would place him behind only Hamilton and Verstappen among the sport’s highest earners.
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