Stella: Norris confidence might be impacted after crash with Piastri

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella says Lando Norris' confidence might be "impacted" after his crash with Oscar Piastri at the Canadian Grand Prix.

Norris admitted he was at fault for the "stupid" move as he tried to overtake Piastri, who is 22 points ahead of his McLaren team-mate in the championship.

The incident saw Norris' first retirement in almost 12 months, with his last failure to see the chequered flag coming at the 2024 Austrian Grand Prix when he collided with Max Verstappen.

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"Obviously it's an episode which cost him championship points," said Stella.

"It's an episode that for his own admission he said, 'the principle was clear, I just made a misjudgement'. He never came to say, 'let's talk about it'.

"This may have an impact in terms of his confidence, but it's up to us as a team to show our full support to Lando.

"And on this one I want to be completely clear, it's full support to Lando. We will have conversations and the conversations may be even tough.

"But there's no doubt over the support we give to Lando and over the fact that we will preserve our parity and equality in terms of how we go racing at McLaren between our two drivers."

Norris apologised immediately to the entire team after the race which Stella "appreciated".

"The situation would be different if Lando would have not taken responsibility and apologised," he continued.

"Lando himself will have to show his character to overcome these kinds of episodes, make sure that he only takes the learnings.

"He only takes what will make him a stronger driver and dismisses anything which will be a little bit of...residual, a little bit of any influence for the future which may not simply be good learning and a stronger driver."

Did Norris' qualifying frustration lead to incident?

Since the early part of the 2025 F1 season, McLaren bosses Zak Brown and Stella have openly acknowledged a collision between their drivers would take place and prepared for such a scenario.

Stella says Sunday's incident will "only make McLaren stronger in terms of our internal competition".

"We said a few times that it wasn't a matter of if, it was more a matter of when. And the when is Canada 2025," he said.

"We never want to see two McLarens having contact. This is part of our principles. This is just a result of a miscalculation, a misjudgement from a racing point of view, which obviously should not happen, but at the same time is part of racing."

Norris was always fighting back in the race after only qualifying seventh, four places behind team-mate Piastri.

He started on the hard tyres but had fresher rubber and more pace in the last stint as he chased down the Australian before the collision.

Stella thinks any disappointment Norris had over qualifying did not influence his "painful" contact with Piastri.

"From Lando's point of view specifically, I'm not sure that there is any reason to do with the fact that he might have struggled a little bit in qualifying to capitalise on his speed that he had demonstrated throughout the weekend," he said.

"Surely there was a bit of frustration for not having qualified as high as he would have liked, but at the moment I wouldn't say that that's the reason why there was a misjudgement today.

"I think this is too long a shot in terms of correlating these two events, but definitely there will be good conversations, but they will happen once we are all rested and calm and we have the possibility to take all the learning and discharge what doesn't have to come with us in the future."

Next up for the 2025 Formula 1 season is a return to Europe for the Austrian Grand Prix, which is live on Sky Sports F1 from June 27-29. Stream Sky Sports with NOW - no contract, cancel anytime.