Norris philosophical on loss of season-best result

Lando Norris took a reflective approach to his last-lap retirement in Spa-Francorchamps, saying McLaren should not let their disappointment overshadow a good performance.

Exiting the final chicane to complete his penultimate lap of the race, Norris lost power and crawled over the line before stopping on the side of the track. Running fifth at the time, the issue saw him overtaken by six other cars still on the lead lap, demoting him to 11th place in the final classification.

However, on a weekend when a crash in Formula 2 saw Anthoine Hubert tragically killed and Juan Manuel Correa seriously injured, Norris was quick to put his frustration into perspective.

“I just about made it onto the last lap and then it all went wrong,” he said. “I started to lose power coming into the final chicane, and that was about it. I lost power, it went into anti-stall, and that was me done. Disappointing, that’s obviously a big negative of course, we lost a load of points.

“We lost a very good result, what was going to be my best result of the season, but at the same time I think other people are in worse situations than I am right now and what we are as a team. So although we’re disappointed I don’t think we can be unhappy with our situation at the moment.”

On Saturday, McLaren had failed to get a car into Q3 for the first time since Barcelona in May, but Norris instantly gained six places with an impressive start as he avoided contact between cars ahead – and he said that there were plenty of reasons for optimism from the first 43 laps of the Belgian Grand Prix.

“I’ve been not so good on the first couple of laps so far this year. That was one of the things over the summer break that I needed to improve was my Lap 1, Turn 1, Turn 2 situations, and I overtook six cars into Turn 1 so it went very well! From then on [Romain] Grosjean was behind for a few laps, but as soon as I started to push we had really good pace in the car so everything was going too well.

“There are a lot of positives. Although in some ways it was a plain sailing race for us, we still had to do the pit stop, we still had to do a lot of things and manage things – manage fuel and so on – so I still had to keep on top of things. I couldn’t just relax and drive the car round, I still had to drive a Formula 1 car, so it wasn’t easy. Those sort of things kept me on my toes, but just one lap too short.”