McLaren hint at cause of Lando Norris’ devastating DNF at F1 Dutch GP

McLaren F1 team boss Andrea Stella has revealed that a chassis-related issue led to Lando Norris’ costly DNF at the Dutch Grand Prix.

Norris was forced to retire from Sunday’s race at Zandvoort after his McLaren F1 car started to smoke.

It put Norris out of the race, a decisive blow in the race for this year’s F1 world championship.

Norris is now 34 points behind McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri in the battle for the drivers’ championship with nine rounds to go.

Norris’ reliability issue was initially thought to be an engine-related issue.

Mercedes-powered teams have struggled with various issues throughout the season.

However, McLaren have been the only unaffected team out of the four (Mercedes, Aston Martin and Williams).

In McLaren’s post-race press release, Stella revealed that they have “identified an issue on the chassis side”, but they intend to do a full investigation before the next round at Monza.

“We’ve identified an issue on the chassis side, and we will do a full review before we go racing again in Monza,” Stella said.

“This is the first technical problem for the team after a long run of faultless reliability.”

Reliability a McLaren strength

As pointed out by Stella, reliability has been one of McLaren’s strengths.

Piastri hasn’t failed to finish a race since the back end of 2023.

For Lando Norris, his DNFs before Zandvoort were crash-related.

He crashed out of the Canadian Grand Prix, while he was involved in an incident with Max Verstappen at the 2024 Austrian Grand Prix.

“Reliability has been a strong point at McLaren for a long time,” Stella added.

“We have had what looks like a technical reliability problem, which is always disappointing.

“The whole team will process this, try to take the learning, reviewing the problem, fixing it, and making sure that this is not a factor anymore for the future, not only for the remainder of the championship, even if, obviously, this is the main focus for the moment.”