For once, Lando Norris's grid drop at the Belgian Grand Prix is deliberate. McLaren revealed on Thursday at Spa-Francorchamps that it has bolted a fourth power electronics unit onto car number one — one past the permitted count — and taken the resulting 10-place penalty on the chin to end a run of Mercedes-supplied reliability grief.
That grief has been the story of Norris's season. The first unit expired in China before he could even start the race. Another played up in Japanese GP practice, and a patched-up version failed again at Monaco. A third had held together, but instead of babying it to the finish, McLaren reached for a new one loaded with Mercedes' newest reliability upgrades.
"Car Number 1's first power electronics unit suffered a terminal issue in China, which meant Lando was unable to start the race," the team confirmed. Its reasoning for the timing was cold and simple: "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." The fresh unit is meant to last the rest of the campaign and head off further penalties.
Norris took it in his stride. "That's just because I've been unlucky in the first part of the season losing a lot of different bits, whether it was the engine or the power unit or the controls – whatever it's been," he said. "I'm on the back foot from a spare parts point of view but that's out of my hands, and out of our hands in some ways. So that's life."
He accepted the logic of doing it here rather than later. "[I've] just got to take it on the chin and deal with some of the penalties that I have coming up, but this is certainly a better track to take the penalties than the next two," Norris said, with the tighter Hungaroring and Zandvoort looming.
His assessment of the wider season was strikingly downbeat. "We've been slow all year," he said, branding the MCL40 "one of the hardest cars I've ever driven in Formula 1." A new rear wing brought no relief either: "It's a very, very small step – probably not even a tenth of a second. Not even half a tenth maybe."
The standings show why it stings. Norris is fifth on 97 points, 11 shy of Charles Leclerc and 82 behind championship leader Kimi Antonelli, whose 179-point haul has turned the title race into a procession. Spending a Spa weekend fighting back through traffic is a long way from where McLaren expected to be.
The one consolation is the venue. Spa's slipstreams, heavy braking zones and elevation changes make it one of the calendar's better places to recover lost positions — if the car underneath Norris has the pace to use them. On current form, that remains an open question.
