Lando Norris has apologised to McLaren fans after he made contact with Lewis Hamilton on the opening lap of the Spanish Grand Prix, a collision that ultimately ruined his race.
Norris, starting in third, made contact with Hamilton as the McLaren's front wing touched the left-rear tyre of the Mercedes at turn two.
It was a disastrous start for Norris as he was forced into the pits to replace his front wing, dropping down to 20th as a result of the incident.
The Briton would eventually finish in 17th, and after the grand prix he took ownership of his mistake in what was a challenging race for the McLaren driver.
“Difficult day for us today,” he said in a video shared by McLaren’s social media page. “Obviously I messed things up with the incident in lap one.
“I just touched the back of Lewis’ tyre and it just took off a bit of my front wing and gave me some damage. So that kind of took me out the race very early on.
“Just a slight misjudgement, but also just a little bit unlucky at the same time, so apologies for that.
Hamilton would avoid any damage from the collision with Norris as he went on to finish second behind eventual winner Max Verstappen, with George Russell coming third
“The rest of it [the race] was just tough, to catch up all of that lost time was difficult. If you push too much here [at Barcelona], you find a lot of other consequences.
“It’s not as easy as just pushing to make up for lost time. The more you push, the more degradation you have, so it’s quite a fine battle.
“But we did our best, we gained a few positions, we made some progress [but] we were just too far out of it to make up for the mistake.
“The car was very good yesterday [in qualifying],”he added. “P3 was mega, but then kind of like the opposite today, so we’re going to look into it to try and understand why we were as good as we were yesterday, because that was the outlier – today wasn’t the outlier.
“Today was kind of how we’ve been this year. But we’ll keep working hard. I’m in the factory for the next few days to try and understand everything.”
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