Lando Norris suffered two gaffes from his pit crew in the same visit to the McLaren garage as he took to the Silverstone track for Friday practice.
Norris is bidding for a strong result at his home race this weekend, with McLaren hoping to perform well at the British Grand Prix. With that in mind, the team will be delighted to have got a double pit stop error out of their system during the inconsequential practice sessions.
The young Brit entered the pit lane planning a quick change of rubber before heading back out onto the track to get in some more practice laps. But he was delayed in doing so when things started to go wrong at the back of his car.
The first issue was nobody's fault, and just an unfortunate incident as the jack lifting up the rear of the car snapped. Unfortunately, the failure came at the exact moment the used rear tyres came off the car, meaning the chassis came slamming down onto the tarmac with an uncomfortable bang.
"Something has broken, hasn't it," said Sky Sports F1 commentator David Croft after he and his co-hosts had winced at the footage of the car floor hitting the deck hard. Karun Chandhok's thoughts were with Norris, as he added: "That is not comfortable for the driver as well, when you get dropped like that to the floor."
Damon Hill speculated that the jack might not have been inserted properly into the rear of the car in the first place, as the pit crew scrambled to find a small trolley that they used to get the rear of the McLaren back up into the air again. They managed to do so, but then came the second problem as they attempted to put new tyres on.
Apparently still flustered after the breaking of the jack, the mechanic in charge of fitting the rear left tyre may well have let his thoughts drift elsewhere as he tried and failed to attack the wheel. The problem this time was not mechanical – he was trying to put on the wheel the wrong way around.
It still proved to be a promising session overall for Norris, though, who went third fastest overall in P2. Only Carlos Sainz and Lewis Hamilton set quicker times than the McLaren man, who managed to sneak ahead of race favourites Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc.
