McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said their cars did not start the Chinese Grand Prix due to different faults on the same part.
Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri failed to start today’s race after McLaren discovered power unit problems on both cars.
“Obviously it’s a disappointing day, quite frustrating because we go racing to be on-track and today we saw two McLarens in the garage while the other cars were racing,” said Stella.
The team found the problem on Norris’s car before he was due to leave the pits for his pre-race reconnaissance lap.
“We saw that there were problems with the electrical side of the power unit,” Stella explained. “We couldn’t communicate with this component.
“We tried to rectify the problem, we tried to change as many parts as possible without having to change that part specifically, because it would take a long time and we couldn’t have made it to the start of the race. We reprogrammed, but there was no way to fix the problem and Lando’s car was simply not in condition to leave the garage.”
Piastri was able to drive to the grid, at which point the team also found a problem on his car. Stella said the fault involved the same component as on Norris’s car.
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“On Oscar’s side, the car was able to go to the grid with no issues at all, but once on the grid the car wouldn’t fire up again,” said Stella.
“It was in a similar manner to Lando’s, but actually on Oscar’s side it was easier to diagnose the problem. It appears to be a problem with the same power unit component on the electrical side, but a problem of a different nature.
“So it’s quite exceptional and uncharacteristic that you have two terminal problems pretty much at the same time on the same component, which in this case is on the electric side of the power unit. We will review, together with HPP [Mercedes High Performance Powertrains], the reason for these faults.
“Like I’ve said to everyone in the team and to HPP, we go as one team. And as one team we will face this disappointing day and we will make sure that it doesn’t happen again in the future.”
The team has not yet identified how to fix the problems, said Stella. “At the moment these issues are understood in terms of what the problem is, but they are not fully understood in the terms of the root cause,” he said. “This will require physical inspection, because from the data we had available and from a superficial external inspection, there’s nothing that is pointing at a specific, more detailed root cause compared to generically saying that the problem is in a certain area.”
However he believes the fault involves Mercedes’ power unit hardware. “This is an area of the car which is not under McLaren’s control so we rely entirely on what is reported by HPP and we trust completely their report.
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“According to their report at the moment the two problems are of a different nature. So, it looks like it’s just a coincidence that they happened at the same time, at the same grand prix, and they were both of a terminal nature.”
“Once we go a little bit deeper, we will be able to have a more comprehensive assessment and see if there’s anything that was actually on the McLaren side,” he added.
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