[Saba Sports News] At the Hungarian Grand Prix, reigning world champion Lando Norris offered a blunt assessment when asked about Mercedes driver George Russell’s struggles with the new car this season. Norris put it plainly: the job of a Formula 1 driver is to drive whatever machine you are given. Whether it is a good car, a poor car, an easy vehicle to handle or a tricky beast to tame, you have to extract the best from it. The intricate energy deployment rules governing the 2026 generation of F1 cars force drivers to make massive mental adjustments to their driving technique. The cars’ heavy reliance on energy recovery has completely rewritten the approach to tackling high-speed corners. Russell has taken time to build rapport with his new machinery. Yet the package widely regarded as the quickest on the grid comes intuitively to his championship-leading teammate Kimi Antonelli. Norris showed little sympathy and drew comparisons with his own career journey. “I have had to change my driving style almost every single year,” Norris said. “Maybe for him one style works for twenty years, but that has never been the case for me. The way I drove back during my test year in 2018 worked once, and that was about it. I have had to keep adapting ever since.”
Norris himself stands as the prime example of this constant adaptability. During the first half of the 2025 campaign, he struggled to unlock the full potential of his McLaren when pushing to the absolute limit in qualifying. It was only after finding solutions both in driving technique and engineering that he got back into contention for the world championship. And this cycle of adaptation shows no sign of slowing down heading into 2026.