Why Zandvoort failure will allow Norris to "chill out" and "just go for it..."

His title hopes took a huge knock in Zandvoort but Norris is keen to move on

A Formula 1 World Championship campaign is made up of 24 race weekends, and they all count.

However if Lando Norris does eventually lose out to McLaren team mate Oscar Piastri by a margin of fewer than 18 points then his mechanical retirement in Zandvoort will perhaps be remembered as the unluckiest break of his season.

Failures are rare amongst the frontrunning teams these days, but down the years the destination of many titles has swung on the basis of retirement or two here or there.

What was perhaps most impressive was Norris’s calm demeanour on team radio as he coasted to a stop and prepared to abandon the car.

In effect the fact that he had done nothing wrong allowed him to quickly accept that it pure bad luck had just robbed him of second place and 18 points, and there was nothing he could do about it.

And intriguingly he also suggested that his title hopes took such a big knock, and Piastri has such a large lead, that he now has less to lose.

“It wasn't my fault, so nothing I can really do,” he said when I asked about his measured response to the failure.

“Just not my weekend, a little bit unlucky yesterday with the wind and unlucky today. So nothing much. Out of my control.

“So a tough one. Of course it's frustrating. It hurts a bit in just for sure, in the championship point of view, it's a lot of points to lose so quickly and so easily. But, yeah, nothing I can control now, so just take it on the chin and move on."

The McLaren drivers have benefited from bulletproof reliability on the chassis and Pu side in recent seasons. So was it perhaps inevitable that eventually something would go awry? Norris didn’t see it that way.

“Not even, because I think the team and HPP have done a very good job over the last two years. I think we've had pretty mu,ch minimal... This might be the first one that I can remember that's cost us any points or anything at all.

“So it's not even inevitable at like this point, because everyone works to such high standards, we don't expect anything, really. So that's why it’s more again just unlucky.

“It's not like in the olden days, when used to pretty much blow up every other race. I don't think it is inevitable, but we don't expect it nowadays, so it's just, yeah, frustrating, unlucky. And that's it.”

Piastri’s lead has now grown to a healthy 34 points, and while we still have nine weekends to go – including a few sprints – it’s starting to look like a difficult task for Norris.

“The only thing I can do is try to win every race!,” he said. “That's going to be difficult, but I'll make sure I give it everything I can. I thought honestly this weekend was good, it wasn't by ever much, and I didn't lose out by much in quali, but I felt always pretty on top of things, and a couple little areas to improve on.

“But if it wasn't for a little gust of wind down the start/finish yesterday, I'd be on pole, and I'm sure the race would have looked a bit different today. The pace was very strong today.

“So there are so many positives. It’s just close. I have a good teammate. He's strong, he's quick in every situation, every scenario. So it's hard to get things back on someone who's just good in pretty much every situation.

“But today is a different situation. It's just unlucky. It's not my fault, and sometimes that's just racing.

“It certainly hasn't helped the [title] race. It's only made it harder for me, and put me under more pressure. But it's almost a big enough gap now that I can just chill out about it and just go for it…”