McLaren says the failure that took Lando Norris out of the Dutch Grand Prix and dealt his 2025 Formula 1 world championship hopes a huge blow was a problem on its side rather than engine supplier Mercedes’.
Norris was running a close second to team-mate and F1 title rival Oscar Piastri with eight laps to go at Zandvoort when he reported smoke in the cockpit and an unusual smell on team radio before suggesting he had an oil leak. His car then ground to a smoky halt, with his retirement leaving him 34 points behind Piastri and nine grands prix remaining.
Although McLaren has not offered any detail on the nature of the failure, it revealed on Sunday night that the problem had originated from its chassis rather than the Mercedes engine.
“We’ve identified an issue on the chassis side, and we will do a full review before we go racing again in Monza,” said team principal Andrea Stella. “This is the first technical problem for the team after a long run of faultless reliability.”
Stella had been vague about the problem in the immediate aftermath of the race.
“We have some initial indications based on the data. But, in fairness, we don't have full proof of what has happened on Lando's car,” he said at the time.
“So I would refrain from making any speculation about is it a problem on the chassis side or is it a problem on the engine side?
“In fairness, it doesn't make, in terms of the result, a big difference. Even in how this is perceived, let me say, I want to take the opportunity to remind ourselves that we just see chassis, engine - it's one single team.”
One reassuring aspect for Norris of McLaren’s discovery is that if the engine shut down because of a problem elsewhere on the car, there is a higher chance that it did not suffer any damage, making it less likely that another set of power unit components will have to be brought into his pool.
Norris’s Sepang 2016 moment?
Norris’s failure was quickly compared to the engine blow-up Lewis Hamilton suffered while leading the 2016 Malaysian GP.
Winning that race would’ve moved Hamilton into the world championship lead after a long pursuit of Mercedes team-mate Nico Rosberg. Instead, he left Sepang 23 points behind and couldn’t recover that gap despite winning four of the remaining five races.
Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff admitted Sepang 2016 still weighed on him when asked by The Race how hard incidents such as Norris’s this weekend were for a team boss to handle when their drivers are locked in a title fight and one has just suffered a big blow that the team was ultimately responsible for.
“Super difficult. Because you're letting a driver down,” Wolff replied.
“Now you could maybe say ‘it's a long season and that was a singular instance’.
“But Lewis is doing the job, he's leading the race [at Sepang in 2016], he's creating a big gap in the championship and then we blow an engine.
“That was tough for him, and was tough for our relationship. I think this is when I had the kitchen talk with him. We didn't speak to each other for a few weeks until I explained to him that I don't want a divorce. We just need to talk about this.
“I would have handled the end of the season differently today than I did in the past because we wanted to control it.”
Norris admitted in the Zandvoort aftermath that Piastri was going to be extremely hard for him to catch now.
"I have a good team-mate. He's strong, he's quick in every situation, every scenario. It's hard to get things back on someone who's just good in pretty much every situation,” he said.
"But today is a different situation. It's just unlucky, it's not my fault, and sometimes that's just racing.
"It certainly hasn't helped. It's only made it harder for me and put me under more pressure.
“But it's almost a big enough gap now that I can just chill out about it and just go for it."
