The defending winner. The McLaren milestone weekend. Every reason to back himself. Lando Norris has chosen a different verdict, and the people he is backing are wearing red.

Lando Norris has publicly tipped Ferrari to take pole position at the 2026 Monaco Grand Prix, ahead of his own McLaren and the dominant Mercedes pair that have led every qualifying session of the season so far. The prediction, delivered in the build-up to a weekend that doubles as McLaren’s 1000th Grand Prix in Formula 1, is an unusually candid public assessment from a driver who arrives in the Principality as the reigning race winner. “I think they will be on pole,” Norris said of Ferrari, signalling that the competitive picture in Monte Carlo may diverge sharply from what has defined the season to date.

The reasoning behind the prediction is structural. Ferrari’s SF-26 has consistently produced the strongest cornering performance on the grid, while the team’s chief weakness across the opening five rounds has been straight-line speed. Monaco, with its 3.337-kilometre layout dominated by slow, tight corners and short connecting straights, removes the deficit that has shaped Ferrari’s season. The FIA’s decision to disable active aerodynamics for the entire weekend, the first such event of the 2026 campaign, sharpens that effect further. The cars will run in permanent Corner Mode with fixed wings, which favors the package that needs every kilometre of straight-line speed least.

Norris is not the only voice making the same call. Multiple paddock observers, including Sky Sports F1 and Total Motorsport, have installed Ferrari as the favourites for the weekend, with bookmakers also pricing Charles Leclerc as the most likely race winner. The Monegasque has won at his home race once before, taking pole and victory in 2024. Lewis Hamilton, fresh from his career-best second place at the Canadian Grand Prix, is a three-time Monaco winner and arrives with the strongest momentum he has carried in red. The Ferrari pair occupy the third and fourth slots in the Drivers’ Championship, three points apart, and present the team with a genuine opportunity to take its first Grand Prix victory of the 2026 season.

What makes Norris’s call notable is what it implicitly says about McLaren. The reigning Constructors’ champions sit third in the standings, behind Mercedes and Ferrari, and arrive in Monaco having endured a difficult Canadian Grand Prix weekend in which Norris retired with a mechanical issue and Oscar Piastri finished out of the points after a 10-second penalty. The 2025 Monaco victory was Norris’s first in the Principality. Returning a year later to predict another team’s pole, rather than projecting confidence in his own, is the kind of public assessment a driver typically reserves for when the underlying data leaves him no other reasonable conclusion.

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has separately framed the team’s task at Monaco around exactly the kind of conditions Norris is referencing. The team has brought a revised rear wing as part of its Monaco-specific package, joining six other teams that have introduced new components in response to the active aero ban. The car’s strengths and weaknesses around the Principality remain partly unknown until practice on Friday, given how comprehensively the regulations are altered for this single weekend. Norris’s prediction is a candid acknowledgement that the early data does not yet flatter McLaren.

The Mercedes question sits underneath everything. Kimi Antonelli leads the championship by 43 points after winning four of the opening five Grands Prix, and George Russell took pole in Canada by 0.068 seconds before retiring from the lead with a power unit failure. The W17 has dominated qualifying through the season’s first five rounds, but its strengths have been concentrated in straight-line speed and energy efficiency. Monaco neutralises both. For the first time in 2026, the qualifying favouritism does not sit with Mercedes, and the man saying so most openly is the driver who won the race twelve months ago. Norris arrives at McLaren’s 1000th Grand Prix expecting Ferrari to start it from the front. The weekend will reveal whether he is right.

Thumbnail: By courtesy of Pirelli