The pit stop issue that cost Norris F1 podium shot in British GP

After jumping Mercedes’ Valtteri Bottas off the line at the restart, Norris had been running in third when he made his pit stop. But a delay of around four seconds meant the Briton returned to the track behind both Bottas and Alpine’s Fernando Alonso.

After the race, McLaren F1 team principal Andreas Seidl explained the issue was related to a hardware problem, rather than human error.

“It was the same crew as always and it was a hardware issue we had,” Seidl said.

“]It was] nothing to do with the performance of the crew, who pulled off great pit stops especially in I would say the last two months when we made good steps forward.

“[It] was a hardware issue with a cross-threaded wheel nut, something we haven’t seen for quite some time so we need to analyse exactly what happened there, analyse the parts and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

“But thanks to all the training the crew did, it meant it was a delayed pit stop but not a catastrophic pit stop like we’ve seen in the past.

“Of course we don’t want it to happen but if it does happen at least it was safe and allowed us to stay in the race.”

Although Norris managed to get past Alonso on his way to claiming a strong fourth place, which kept up his remarkable run of consecutive points finishers for McLaren, the 21-year-old felt he had the pace to fight for more.

“It was still a very good race at the end of the day, I’m still P4 in my home race, and that’s a good result from sixth yesterday. Just here, I just wanted that little bit more,” he said.

“I held onto third for the whole of the first stint, so we had pace to hold [the Mercedes] off, not necessarily to catch them up and do anything else. But because of the pit stop, I didn’t get the chance to be ahead and defend for as long as possible. It would have been nice to fight for it and have that opportunity, but fourth and fifth for us as a team is still a good result.

“Fourth is still a very good result for us, so it’s not like I’m really annoyed. I’m just annoyed that I didn’t get the opportunity to fight and put on a good show and at least have some battling and some racing.”