Lando Norris had a tough time near the end of the Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai. For most of the race, he was running in second place behind his McLaren teammate, Oscar Piastri, and things looked quite steady.

But in the final laps, Norris started having a serious problem with his brakes. He told the team over the radio that the brake pedal felt “long,” meaning he had to press it much further than normal to slow the car down. Unfortunately, the issue kept getting worse lap by lap.

Because of this, Norris had to slow down a lot and couldn’t keep pushing to catch Piastri. In fact, he nearly lost second place to George Russell, who was quickly closing in.

To protect the car, Norris had to lift off the throttle early and gently coast into the heavy braking zones, especially at Turns 6 and 14. This helped avoid putting too much pressure on the brakes, which could have made things even worse.

Despite all this, Norris managed to hold onto second and helped McLaren secure a one-two finish. He also kept his lead in the championship, now eight points ahead of Max Verstappen.

After the race, McLaren’s team principal Andrea Stella explained what had gone wrong. He, quoted by RacingNews365, said: “We understand what the problem is, which I can’t disclose for IP reasons. But fundamentally, it had to do with a leak in one of the components, not in the brake line, but somewhere else, and the main action required was to limit the peak brake pressure.”

In simple terms, there was a leak in the braking system (though not in the main brake line), and Norris had to avoid braking too hard so the problem didn’t get worse.

Stella explained how Norris had to change the way he was driving: “You could brake, but very, very gently. So what was 100-metre braking, became 200 metres, and towards the end, it was 300 metres because Lando needed to lift the throttle, coast to a certain speed and then apply very gentle brake pressure. That was to avoid the leak becoming too fast.”

He added: “The brake pedal was going long, and what we needed to do was to avoid the peak pressure, so Lando needed to brake with less and less and less peak pressure. It got to the point over the final laps where he was just coasting for a long time, off throttle, and then just applying minimum brake pressure to stop the car and go around the corner.”

Even though the result was strong for the team, Stella admitted he wasn’t completely happy. “We are happy with the one-two, but we had a failure on Lando’s car with the brake pedal that we had to manage over the last twenty laps,” he said.

“Lando and the team did a great job in managing the situation and adapting the driving style to the problem, which then got worse to the point where it put the result at risk, which is unacceptable from a reliability point of view, we need to do better.”