McLaren frustrated: 'This cannot happen in Formula One!'

In Q1, a strange situation set Lando Norris back. The British driver's car lost performance because advertising banners were stuck in his McLaren. Andrea Stella was furious with this, while eventually, Norris could secure a place in Q2 and finished in P4 in qualifying in the principality.

Advertising banners stuck in a car is definitely not usual in Formula One, but on Saturday, Lando Norris could tick off this experience. The Briton was caught out in Q1, putting him in risk of getting eliminated early on. "What happened in Q1 is something that should not happen. It's not up to the standards of racing circuits. The fact that the car picks up what was a few metres of advertising banners. We caught it under the car and the car lost as much downforce as equivalent to 3 seconds per lap," team principal Andrea Stella commented angrily to GPblog among others after qualifying.

Stella continued: "It shouldn't happen that the car is compromised by these kind of problems that have been there right from FP1. It's not suddenly in qualifying, we have the banners coming off. It's been there every single session, and we need to fix it because I think today it affected Lando in a pretty catastrophic way from a performance point of view."

The McLareen team principal wants this issue to be addressed: "So what is exactly going to determine the race result tomorrow? The luck as to whether you take the banners or not, or we want this to come as an outcome of the quality of the drivers, the car and the teams. Something needs to be done."

Stella praises team

On the other hand, Stella was satisfied with how his team dealt with this strange situation. "I have to praise the responsiveness of our team in assessing that. Despite that, we were so much under pressure with time, we had lost so much performance that we needed to pit, otherwise we would have been out anyhow."