McLaren reveal rush to fix Lando Norris issue after worrying 'crack'

McLaren has revealed that it made a brake duct change on Lando Norris’ car during qualifying after a crack appeared on the component.

The Woking-based squad entered qualifying hoping to challenge at the front of the field and secure its first pole position of the season.

However, it lacked the pace to join the battle, with Norris and team-mate Oscar Piastri forced to settle for sixth and seventh respectively.

Norris’ session was far from straightforward, as an issue emerged with his brake duct, which McLaren initially attempted to repair with glue.

However, that solution only made the problem worse.

“On the brake duct, it initially looked like a crack that we could repair with some glue,” Stella told media including RacingNews365. 

“We attempted it, but then when the car went for - I think it was the second run in Q1 - then we saw that the crack was propagating despite the glue.”

The mechanics were then forced into a race against time to get the duct changed for the rest of qualifying.

“So at some stage we decided to change it,” Stella added. 

“We knew that it took 10 minutes, so we wanted to make sure that we finished the run in time to be able to go out with the new part installed.”

Stella has denied that Norris needs to change his approach on the track to stop the issue from occurring once again.

“We tried to see whether this was coming from a particular usage of the kerb, but we found no anomaly from this point of view,” he said.

“So we think that the damage might have happened somewhere else, possibly even in practice and it kind of propagated through qualifying.

“But there is no problem on Oscar's car, and there was no problem yesterday. So we thought we didn't need to restrict the racing line at all, we needed to go as fast as possible.”