McLaren handed 'unacceptable' warning after surprise Norris failure

Andrea Stella has warned his McLaren team that issues such as Lando Norris' brake problem in the Chinese Grand Prix are "unacceptable."

With Norris chasing team-mate Oscar Piastri for the lead in Shanghai, he was forced to drastically reduce his pace in the closing stages as a major brake issue developed on his MCL39 machine.

Mercedes' George Russell closed to within 1.3s of Norris at the line as the McLaren driver was forced to lift and coast into the heavy-braking zones to avoid putting undue pressure on the faulty system, but still managed to come home second to Piastri for McLaren's first one-two of the season. 

"We were tense on the pit-wall because we had the issue on Lando's car with the brakes that we needed to manage over the last 20 laps," Stella told media including RacingNews365 after McLaren's one-two.

"Lando and the team did a very good job of being in the loop as to how to adapt the driving style to this kind of problem, which got worse and worse through the race and put the entire result at risk. 

Despite the good result, Stella was firm that such problems that put results at risk were not acceptable.

"It is obviously not acceptable from a reliability point of view and we need to do better, and this will be one of the points that we will definitely re-emphasise 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 was very good at adapting to some behaviours of the tyres and the car which were not ideal for him.

“He learned his way and without the brake problem, it would have been an interesting final part of the race."