Lando Norris will start the Belgian Grand Prix from at least 10 places back, and for once the setback is a choice. McLaren confirmed on Thursday at Spa-Francorchamps that it has fitted car number one with a fourth power electronics unit — one beyond the season's allocation — accepting the automatic grid penalty to draw a line under months of Mercedes-supplied reliability trouble.
The failures have followed Norris all year. His first power electronics unit died in China, leaving him unable to take the start. A replacement misbehaved in practice in Japan, and a repaired unit failed again during second practice at Monaco. A third had been running cleanly, but rather than nurse it to the end of the season, McLaren opted for a fresh unit carrying Mercedes' latest fixes.
"Car Number 1's first power electronics unit suffered a terminal issue in China, which meant Lando was unable to start the race," the team said in a statement. It explained the timing bluntly: "We have chosen to do this in Belgium, a circuit where overtaking is relatively more prevalent, as opposed to the following two events in Hungary and Zandvoort." The new unit is intended to see out the year, minimising the risk of further penalties down the line.
Norris was philosophical about a weekend that just got harder. "That's just because I've been unlucky in the first part of the season losing a lot of different bits, whether it was the engine or the power unit or the controls – whatever it's been," he said. "I'm on the back foot from a spare parts point of view but that's out of my hands, and out of our hands in some ways. So that's life."
He agreed Spa was the least painful place to swallow the medicine. "[I've] just got to take it on the chin and deal with some of the penalties that I have coming up, but this is certainly a better track to take the penalties than the next two," Norris said — a nod to the tight Hungaroring and Zandvoort, where recovering lost ground is far harder than on Spa's long straights.
The penalty lands on a season Norris has already described in unusually flat terms. "We've been slow all year," he said, calling the MCL40 "one of the hardest cars I've ever driven in Formula 1." A rear-wing tweak on the car this weekend offered little comfort. "It's a very, very small step – probably not even a tenth of a second. Not even half a tenth maybe," he said.
The numbers underline the stakes. Norris sits fifth in the drivers' championship on 97 points, 11 adrift of Ferrari's Charles Leclerc and a distant 82 behind runaway leader Kimi Antonelli on 179. A weekend spent carving back through the field is not how a title challenger wants to spend the second half of the year, and it leaves McLaren managing damage rather than chasing wins.
Starting deep in the pack at a circuit where slipstreams and long braking zones reward a quick car, Norris at least has the layout on his side. Whether the MCL40 has the pace to make the gamble pay is the question McLaren cannot yet answer.
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*Originally published on [newsformula.one](https://newsformula.one/article/norris-takes-10-place-spa-penalty-to-break-mclarens-engine-curse). Visit for full coverage.*