Lando Norris hopes the intra-team battle at Mercedes can help bring McLaren into the 2026 Formula 1 title fight.

Reigning world champion Norris’s title defence has got off to a difficult start, with the Briton sitting fifth in the drivers’ standings on 25 points, 47 points adrift of early championship leader Kimi Antonelli.

Mercedes has enjoyed a near-perfect start to the campaign and has a 100 per cent winning record, with George Russell claiming victory at the season-opener in Australia, before Antonelli took back-to-back wins in China and Japan.

McLaren has been left playing catch up but Norris hopes the Mercedes pair continue to take points off each other as they battle for wins.

“Certainly, the more that they can battle, the better,” Norris told media including Crash.net.

“It’s good to see. Kimi is in his second year in F1, so he’s doing a good job. It’s also cool to see. He’s a very nice guy, and he’s performing well at the top level in Formula 1.

“He’s had a good few races, so it’s good to see that he’s kind of found that extra bit of pace and battling George convincingly, which is cool, but it’s a good thing for us.

“We know we were a little bit on the back foot at the beginning of the season. We certainly hope that we can catch up, and the more points they can take away from each other, the better – the same like us last year and Max in a fight.

“Hopefully it can be a similar story the other way around.”

McLaren is set to be boosted by a major upgrade package at this weekend’s Miami Grand Prix, which comes after a five-week enforced break following the cancellation of races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia due to the Iran War.

Team principal Andrea Stella teased “an entirely new” McLaren MCL40 car in Miami, raising hopes that the Woking outfit can fight Mercedes at upcoming races.

"In our intent there was always the idea to deliver a completely new car,” Stella explained. "Especially from an aerodynamic upgrades point of view for the North American races so we could keep up with this plan. Obviously the fact that the calendar has been changed sort of helped a little bit, like I'm sure it helped all the other teams that could work more streamlined towards upgrading the car rather than being busy with racing.

"But I could say overall that across Miami and Canada we will see an entirely new MCL40. Again I would like to stress that this is what I would expect of most of our competitors, so not necessarily is going to be a shift in the pecking order.

"It will be effectively just a check who has been able to add more performance within the same time frame. And we also have some performance to recover if we look at Mercedes and to some extent Ferrari as well, but we are quite happy with the development that we have been able to manage in the background.

“So hopefully we should be able to see a slightly more competitive MCL40 in Miami and then in Canada, considering that the last race was already a decent competitive performance in Japan, so we definitely look forward to the next races."

McLaren has strong recent history in Miami, having won the last two races at the Hard Rock Stadium.