A drubbing. A crash back down to Earth. After spending three race weekends fighting close to the front of the field, the Belgian GP weekend was nothing short of a reality check for McLaren, per Lando Norris. But his team principal Andrea Stella feels otherwise. According to him, the race in Spa was just a blip in McLaren’s turnaround this season and nothing to worry about. And what excuse did he give? He said, “In perfect hindsight, we could have tried to find some other solution to reduce the drag on the car. The real correlation is the fact that because we were busy working on other things (referring to the upgrade package), we didn’t have the time to work on low-drag rear wings.”

Spa-Francorchamps is a circuit where the downforce setting is crucial, primarily because the first and third sectors are polar opposites of the twisty, slow middle sector. And it’s safe to say, McLaren, with its high downforce setting, might not have got it wrong, but it didn’t get it right either. And Lando Norris paid the price on Sunday in sunny conditions. After starting P7, he dropped to P16 solely because the MCL60 was the slowest car on the straights, and in his words, “Everyone was overtaking me before the DRS activation zone.”

While he did recover to P7 and scored points when McLaren looked to have no hope, he wasn’t happy with how the race played out. In a post-race interview, as quoted by pitdebrief.com, he said, “We need to rethink how we approach a race weekend, with the wing level and stuff. It might work on one, but it doesn’t work on all of them, and we clearly got it wrong this weekend.”

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McLaren’s upgrade package worked well in Austria, Silverstone, and Hungary. But it didn’t in Spa. And that’s what McLaren needs to work on during the summer break—ensuring the MCL60 has elements that work well throughout the year and not just suited to a few tracks. While the race didn’t go according to plan, Norris revealed he was surprised with the result.

Lando Norris’ mid-race comeback surprised him

Much like how McLaren’s season has played out so far—with the Woking squad making a comeback mid-season—Lando Norris’ Belgian GP was like a mini version of that. After the first part of the race that saw him drop down the field to P16, he opted for an aggressive strategy that helped him come back into the points and finish where he started—in P7.

He revealed, “We had to try something, so we went onto the hard, this was even worse. But no one had ever used the hard all weekend, so we thought, ‘Normally it suits us.’ So I think it was the right decision to try, but that was still terrible. Then we put the softs on, and everything came back towards us. I didn’t know how we came P7, honestly. I felt like I was last for the most part, and I ended up P7. So I’m a little bit surprised, honestly.”

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Watch This Story: “F**ked It Up Again”: Lando Norris’ Frustrated Apology After Bad Luck at 2023 Monaco GP

Do you think McLaren’s Belgian GP was a proper drubbing as Lando Norris felt, or was it just a blip in its upward trajectory?