Norris: Vegas crash caused by ‘combination of things’, not track

Lando Norris says a bump on the entry of Las Vegas’ Turn 11 was but one factor among several others that led to his heavy crash on the third lap of last weekend’s race.

Norris lost control of his McLaren on the entry to the fast left-hand corner, the Briton heavily clouting the wall and coming to rest well down the road.

It was a brutal impact that knocked the wind out of the McLaren charger, although he felt okay once he came to his sense, while the subsequent mandatory check-up revealed no physical damage.

“Honestly, I was never bad,” Norris told the media in Abud Dhabi on Thursday. “They just wanted to do a lot of checkups and stuff, kind of the new normal nowadays it seems. But it was fine.

“I was winded, just what you heard on the radio and stuff when I had the impact. I breathed in or out at the wrong time and it just kind of caught me off guard a little bit.

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“It happened quite quickly, it was still a decent impact. But I was fine. I never struggled with anything.

“I was more just frustrated that I was out of the race in Vegas so early on. It was more just a shame. But I was fine.

“I've been advised ever since to just chill out, relax for a few days. But I was good since I pretty much jumped out of the car. A little shaken at first, just because it caught me by surprise so much.”

In the aftermath of the crash, McLaren team boss Andrea Stella alluded to a bump in the road at Turn 11 that he hoped would be smoothed out for next year’s race.

But Norris reckoned that several elements had conspired to unsettle his MCL60 as he entered the corner.

“It was a combination of things,” he said. "The obvious one being there is quite a big bump there.

“Then cold tyres, so therefore lower ride heights than what you normally running with.

"The first time following a lot of cars through all of this, you have even less downforce than what you already have. And then a couple of other little things in the background that just made this bump have a bigger effect than what it normally has.

"I think I've somehow must have caught it at a worse angle than normal. I always knew there was a bump there.

"But just for some reason, the effects of it on this one lap seemed a lot bigger than what it had done previously. So just a little bit unlucky at the same time.

"I think the track is okay. It's not the best track I've ever driven, if it was just higher grip. I think the tarmac made it a lot worse than what every driver would have wanted."

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