Lando Norris has already lost one of his three allowed batteries for the 2026 F1 season with supplier Mercedes unable to fix it after his car failed to start in China.<\/p>\n
McLaren arrives at Suzuka, having failed to start either car at the Chinese GP because of two different issues with the same electrical component on its customer Mercedes engines.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the gap between the China and Japan weekends, McLaren worked closely with Mercedes\u2019 High Performance Powertrains engine division to properly diagnose the issues.<\/p>\n
In doing so, The Race understands the battery on Norris\u2019s McLaren was deemed unsalvageable, so he\u2019ll require a new battery for this weekend\u2019s Japanese GP.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
His team-mate Oscar Piastri\u2019s battery has had an internal component fixed with permission from the FIA, but a final assessment on whether it is in the clear will only be possible after it has run in the car in Friday practice.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe’ve put a lot of joint effort [McLaren and Mercedes HPP] into understanding the problem and making sure it doesn’t happen again,\u201d Piastri said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Drivers are usually only allowed two batteries (often referred to as energy stores) per F1 season, but given the major regulation overhaul, they\u2019ve been allowed three batteries for 2026.<\/p>\n
It still potentially puts Norris in a tight spot should he encounter further battery issues, as he\u2019ll be slapped with a grid penalty should he exceed the battery limit.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAlongside HPP, I think it took a little bit of time to figure things out, but yes of course it hurt us as a team, certainly didn\u2019t make us look good to have two cars not starting a race,\u201d Norris said on Thursday at Suzuka.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat hurt more is the fact that it was out of our control. But with HPP we\u2019ve worked hard to figure things out, to understand how it happened, why it happened, and of course, we\u2019ll do everything we can to make sure it doesn\u2019t happen again.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cBut you live and you learn. It was a tough one for all of us.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lando Norris has already lost one of his three allowed batteries for the 2026 F1 season with supplier…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":546590,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[99],"class_list":{"0":"post-546589","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546589\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/546590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}