6 hours ago
10
Lando Norris believes he can still be competitive at this weekend’s Belgian Grand Prix, despite a 10-place grid penalty. The defending world champion will nonetheless have his work cut out at Spa after his McLaren team took a new battery for his car, the fourth, one more than is allowed.
Norris is fifth in the world championship, 82 points behind the leader, Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli. He and McLaren have endured a series of failures from their Mercedes power unit this season, including “terminal” issues with the power electronics unit, a part of the battery. One failed in China, one was withdrawn in Japan, repaired but failed at Monaco.
With Mercedes having since applied reliability updates, McLaren have opted to take the latest specification of engine, and with it the new battery, at Spa, where they hope the opportunities for overtaking will to some extent mitigate the grid penalty.
“I hope it’s not the end of my weekend before it started but I’m still confident we can have a good race,” said Norris. “I have to wait and see really how the overtaking is. We probably have a small straight-line speed advantage, comparing to people a little bit further back. So comparing to them we should have a good chance.
“To just overtake in general could be pretty difficult here but the slipstream is pretty big and there’s still a few straights, but there’s no straight-line mode, and therefore the slipstream is pretty large, and you can gain a good amount from that.”
Norris’s title defence has been difficult thus far with McLaren, who won the drivers’ and constructors’ championship double last season, unable to match the dominant Mercedes for pace. Over recent meetings, upgrades by Ferrari and Red Bull have also moved them marginally ahead of McLaren and Norris, who failed to start one race and retired from a further two of the nine races so far, conceded he had not had the best fortune.
“We have been unlucky so far in losing different bits, the engine, the power unit or the controls,” he said. “And I’m on the back foot in terms of a spare parts point of view but that is out of my hands. That’s life, and you’ve got to take it on the chin.” With the next two rounds in Hungary and then, after the summer break, in Zandvoort, and with McLaren expecting to bring their next tranche of aerodynamic improvements to those two meetings, taking the penalty in Belgium was unsurprising. They will also expect to see some improvement from the latest spec Mercedes engine which the works team has been using for the last two races and was a step up on the version which started the season.
The team are hopeful that the improved reliability of the battery electronics will see it through to the end of the season without requiring replacement again and incurring a further penalty.“Mercedes has introduced a series of reliability fixes to their new power electronics systems,” the team said in a statement. “In order to take advantage of these improvements, we must incur a 10-place grid penalty on Lando’s car in order to take a new unit. We have chosen to do this in Belgium, a circuit where overtaking is relatively more prevalent, as opposed to the following two events in Hungary and Zandvoort. We now plan to use this fourth power electronics unit for the remainder of the season, in order to maximise reliability while minimising sporting penalties on Lando.”
