Lando Norris says his McLaren team hid the brake issue from him for most part of F1 Chinese GP, as Andrea Stella cannot explain in-depth due to IP.
For most part, it looked a normal outing for McLaren’s Norris, who tucked himself behind teammate Oscar Piastri in F1 Chinese GP. The Brit was not as far behind where he was likely saving tyres after they switched to one stop strategy. The gap steadied for most of the grand prix.
But as the race progressed, there was distress calls made by Norris to his team. It was not related to tyres and or team orders, but it was discussion on long pedal. The Brit complained of it and it steadily grew in the last few laps. His race engineer eventually conceded that it is critical.
For the last few laps, Norris braked differently to combat the problem and see the chequered flag. All this while, the gap came down to almost under second between him and Mercedes’ George Russell. Fortunately, for the McLaren driver, the latter did not have enough laps to make his move.
Post-race, Norris noted that his team hid the problem from him to not make him worry. And only when things became critical, they alerted him of the trouble. The Brit eventually had to buckle down and save second to still the championship. But it was a recovery from where he ended up in sprint.
The team made changes between the sprint and qualifying to allow them to operate better. Team boss Stella notes that they know what failed but they can’t reveal it in detail due to IP. The Italian stated that there was leak which affected his braking – although it is something he doesn’t want to happen again.
Race –
Norris: “Tough race. Yeah. I mean, I’m just satisfied for the result, for the team. You know, 50th 1–2 for McLaren is quite an achievement, so happy to be part of that, first of all, and a great race by Oscar. I’m happy considering how bad my last few days have been and how much I struggled just to get comfortable and understand how to drive the car. To go to the pace I had today, which I think was very strong, it was a much better race than I was thinking I was going to have. I was not confident one bit and yeah, I was nervous that I was going to struggle just as badly, honestly. But very satisfied to know how much I’ve improved from a car point of view, from a driving point of view. Today was a much stronger day, so I’m more satisfied to know I’ve got answers for my struggles and yeah, that makes me happy. But I’m of course more happy for the 1–2 for the team.”
Stella: “I am happy with the 1-2. And we have been tense at the pit wall, and I’m sure the entire team and the fans, because we had one issue on Lando’s car with the brake pedal that we needed to manage over the last 20 laps. Lando and the team did a very good job in being in the loop as to how to adapt the driving style to this kind of problem, which then got worse and worse through the race and put the entire result at risk — which is obviously just not acceptable from a reliability point of view.
“We need to do better. And this will be one of the points that we will definitely reemphasise to the entire team that have worked at an incredibly high level, but we cannot have issues that put these sort of results at risk. Lando has been very-very good at adapting to some behaviours of the tyres in the car that was not ideal for him but he learnt his way and today I think without the brake problem, it would have been interesting second part of the race.”
Car from sprint to main race –
Norris: “That’s stuff the team will know, and probably no one else, but we made a good amount of changes. Obvious ones, to try and improve the front end. I just can’t drive a car with no front. I can, but I struggle, and it’s just been too understeery, simply, the car, the last few days—I cannot maximise the package that way. I think we both struggled a lot yesterday with that, and it shows that our pace today was from both of us a lot stronger than it was yesterday. So I think we’re both still, as a team we’re still understanding this car and knowing its limitations, how to get the most out of it.
“But I feel like, especially for me, in the longer run stuff and even the short run stuff, I’ve not been anywhere near as confident as I would like to be, and I’ve not got the feeling from the car that I need in order to maximise the performance. But today was a much better showing of that and a much better understanding of it. So yeah, made some tweaks with the car, mechanically and aerodynamically, and it was a much better day today. So I’m happy with it.”
Stella: “There was good learning from the sprint, I think you saw that the set-up that we had was using too much front tyres, so we needed to make some adjustments to this. About the car, we also worked extensively with the two drivers to adapt the driving style, because like I said before, according to driving style, Oscar was having less graining than Lando, so Lando needed to pick something from Oscar and there were few things that Oscar picked from Lando.”
Brake issues –
Norris: “I think they started to go quite early. But, you know, you always get a bit of a tendency for the brakes to get a tiny bit longer. I think the team were hiding it from me because they saw the problem starting a lot earlier and they knew it was going to be a problem. But like the last 10 laps, I was pretty nervous about just being able to finish the race because it was noticeable how much worse it was getting every single lap and every braking zone. It’s really not a nice feeling when you’re in the car and you expect a nice solid pedal and there’s just nothing and it goes to the floor. Doesn’t fill you with confidence, especially on a fast track like this. So we were lucky simply to finish the race and still to finish ahead of George. We were very lucky. I think the last couple laps were 3 or 4 seconds or more off.
“So we had a difficult ending and I would have loved to have pushed a little bit more and tried to give Oscar a bit of a run, but not today. So something we need to understand and make sure it doesn’t happen again. I really hope not [that it happens in Suzuka]! No, no expectation of it. I think it was an issue that happened that shouldn’t have happened, basically. I think it was rapidly getting worse, probably quicker than the team were anticipating when they saw it. I think they saw it quite a bit earlier—just after the halfway point of the race—but then it was accelerating in deterioration. So whatever it was, I’m not sure, but it got critical in the last five laps. So I think it’s a problem that shouldn’t happen, basically. And I’m sure they’ll try and understand it and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Stella: “The brake pedal was going long and what we needed to do was to avoid more and more the peak pressure, so Lando needed to brake with less and less and less peak pressure. It got to the point over the final laps where he was just coasting for a long time, off throttle, and then just applying minimum amount of brake pressure to stop the car and go around the corner. We understand what the problem is, which I can’t disclose for IP reasons. But fundamentally, it had to do with a leak in one of the components, not in the brake line, but somewhere else, and the main action required was to limit the peak brake pressure. You could brake, but very, very gently. So what was 100-metre braking, now it became 200 metres, and towards the end, it was 300 metres because Lando needed to lift the throttle, coast to a certain speed and then apply very gentle brake pressure. That was to avoid the leak becoming too fast.”
Strategy wise –
Stella: “Lando wanted to save some tyres to see if he could attack Oscar at the end, I think Oscar was doing pretty much the same, lets see if Lando attacks then I have tyres. But at the same time, as a team we needed to open more gap on Russell and the Ferraris. Because for a long time, they have been within undercut and in the race we saw as soon as you pit, you can go even 2-3s faster, even with the hard when Hamilton did it, it did seem to be the case. So, good teamwork and the idea was to let the guys….’okay I think we are cool with the gaps and cool with the tyres, if you guys want to pick up the pace just do it’. The races wasn’t controlled at any stage but I think both understood that there was a phase in which there was no point in pushing to hard because the way to end was long and uncertain from the guys point of view.”
Here’s race start: https://www.formula1.com/en/video/2025-chinese-grand-prix-piastri-leads-from-pole-as-norris-jumps-russell.1827367910236875162
Here’s how F1 Chinese GP panned out
