Lando Norris believes McLaren need to make significant progress if they want to fight closer to the front at the Chinese Grand Prix.

The reigning world champion started his title defence with a fifth-place finish in the season opener in Melbourne, finishing more than 50 seconds behind Mercedes driver George Russell. The result underlined that McLaren have not yet found the performance level they expected under the new regulations.

With only a few days between the Australian and Chinese races, Norris says the team has been working intensively to analyse the data and address the issues identified in Melbourne.

“It’s been a busy week for the whole team, both the team that are here travelling but also the team back in MTC (McLaren Technology Centre), trying to step it up as much as possible,” said Norris, as quoted by F1's official website during Thursday’s media day in Shanghai.

“It has been full of learnings, some good things, some not so good things, but all things that we need to [and] we want to improve on... Learn what we could from others, learn what we could from ourselves, and do a much better job all-round here in Shanghai.”

Although McLaren run the same power unit as Mercedes, Norris admitted the team has not yet fully mastered how to extract the maximum performance from the new engine package introduced for 2026.

“It’s understanding of the power unit – we haven’t done as good of a job as we should have done, so our own understanding is not to the level we want it to be at and the team have worked very hard to improve that,” said Norris.

At the same time, Norris acknowledged that the car itself also requires further development.

“But I also said, the chassis is not to the level that we want it to be at. It’s certainly not bad and we’re certainly not miles away. I think we’re not as far as it almost looked in Melbourne.”

Another area that proved difficult in Australia was tyre management, something Norris expects could remain challenging at the Shanghai International Circuit.

“We need to improve it more, but we know that. We know where we’re stronger, we know where we’re weaker. Our tyre management was pretty tricky last weekend in Melbourne and might be quite tricky again here with the graining. We kind of need to improve a little bit of everything, honestly, it wasn’t just one thing or just the other.” Both our car and our understanding of the power unit needs to improve, and the team have done a lot of work on that to try and do better this weekend,” the McLaren driver added.