McLaren team principal Andrea Stella says the team will help Lando Norris weed out costly mistakes after his second slow start in a row at Spa.
Norris dropped from fourth to seventh at the start of Sunday’s Belgian Grand Prix by running wide out of Turn 1 and, with overtaking extremely difficult, Norris never managed to recover from dropping into traffic, finishing sixth in the wake of Red Bull’s Max Verstappen.
A crestfallen Norris slated himself after the race for what he called a “stupid” mistake, having also botched his start at the Hungarian Grand Prix that opened the door to team-mate Oscar Piastri winning the race instead.
“I’ve given away a lot of points over the last three, four races just because of stupid stuff – mistakes and bad starts, Turn 1 now,” Norris said.
“I think I just need to reset. The last two, three races I’ve just not clicked as much as I needed to and given up a lot of points, so hopefully I can come back strong.”
When asked by Motorsport.com what McLaren can do to help Norris get his momentum back as Verstappen continues to control the title race, Stella said the team would analyse with Norris why his race starts aren’t as strong as they can be.
“First of all, these kinds of situations are always very, very marginal,” Stella replied. “I think Lando got a little distracted from what was happening on the inside and ran out of track.
Lando Norris, McLaren F1 Team, on the grid with his engineer
Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images
“We work with Lando, like we work with Oscar, to try and see all the opportunities in which we can improve individually, but also collaborate better.
“It definitely gives us some elements to analyse as to how some of these missed opportunities manifest themselves.
“For Lando, for instance, it looks like there are statistically some opportunities that tend to happen in the early stages of the race, so we need to check whether this is early stages of the race for a reason, or it’s just random.”
“Like any other athlete or driver, Lando – with the support the team – will think: ‘What can I do better to make sure we capitalise on the good work we are doing?'”
Stella doesn’t think Norris could have salvaged much more than sixth at that point, as overtaking proved much more difficult than thought, which meant Norris couldn’t use his fresher tyres to find a way past Verstappen.
“Once we lost the positions at the start with this low degradation and difficult overtaking, we definitely made our life difficult,” Stella added.
“We were a little surprised that we could not overtake, and Verstappen made the medium last in the final stint, like not many other drivers managed to do.
“We were just expecting that these tyres would have fallen off and they didn’t, so we thought overtaking Verstappen would have been easy and it proved not to be the case.”
