Why a Lando Norris brake issue was "not acceptable" for McLaren

Lando Norris had to nurse a brake issue in the Chinese GP

An otherwise perfect Sunday for the McLaren Formula 1 team in China was spoiled by a brake issue that Lando Norris had to manage for the last part of the race.

The team came away with a welcome one-two result led by Oscar Piastri after a difficult sprint the previous day, but a long brake pedal for Norris created some tension.

Paradoxically at the same time the situation also made the team's life easier in terms of any stress associated with allowing the two drivers to race, as it prevented Norris from being able to fight with Piastri.

Nevertheless team principal Andrea Stella made it clear that any sort of reliability issue was “not acceptable” in the context of the World Championship fight.

“We have been tense at the pitwall, and I'm sure the entire team and the fans, because we had one issue on Lando's car with a brake pedal that we needed to manage over the last 20 laps,” said the Italian.

“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 re-emphasise to the entire team that has worked at an incredibly high level, but we cannot have issues that put these sort of results at risk.

He added: “The brake pedal was going long, and what we needed to do is we needed to avoid more and more the peak pressure.

“So he needed to brake with less and less and less peak pressure, to the point that over the final laps, he was just costing for a long time off the throttle, and then applying just a minimum amount of brake pressure to stop the car and go around the corner.”

Stella declined to elaborate on exactly what the root cause of the issue was.

"We understand what the problem is, which I don't disclose for IP reasons, but fundamentally, it had to do with a leak in one of the components, not the brake line, but somewhere else.

“And the main action required was to limit the peak brake pressure, or like just you could brake, but very, very gently.

"So what was a 100 metre braking, now it became 200 metres, and towards the end, it was a 300 metres, because Lando needed to lift the throttle, cost to a certain speed and then apply very gentle brake pressure. That was to avoid that leak to become too fast.”