‘It hurts’: Wolff sees echoes of Hamilton 2016 in Norris’ Dutch GP heartbreak
Lando Norris’ title charge hit its first real pothole at Zandvoort — and Toto Wolff felt the jolt from the other end of the pit lane.
The McLaren driver was stalking Oscar Piastri in what looked set to be another papaya one-two when a puff of smoke and a rapidly sick-sounding MCL39 ended his afternoon on the spot. From three wins in four to a Dutch Grand Prix DNF, Norris now trails Piastri by 34 points with nine rounds left. It’s not curtains, but it’s a bruise.
Wolff’s seen a blow like this before. In 2016, Lewis Hamilton’s title bid went up in flames — literally — while leading comfortably in Malaysia. Nico Rosberg banked third that day and marched on to the championship.
“We had Lewis in Malaysia with a failure that cost him a win while he was in the lead,” the Mercedes team boss reflected. “That’s what I saw today. It’s a pity when a car fighting for a championship retires in a close fight. It hurts.”
What, exactly, failed on Norris’ car remains murky. Wolff was careful not to pin it on Mercedes High Performance Powertrains. “We don’t know whether it was a pure chassis failure yet. We know it was an oil leak,” he said, adding that the reliability niggles seen across the Mercedes-powered camp this year haven’t been one and the same. “They’ve been different.”
That assessment tracks with a choppy run for the PU’s customer teams. Andrea Kimi Antonelli bowed out of the Spanish GP early, Williams have chased gremlins of their own, and Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin expired around the streets of Monaco. Until Zandvoort, McLaren looked like the last Mercedes-powered outfit with a clean bill of health.
The wider context is the era: modern F1 is so dependable that DNFs in the title fight jump off the page. That’s why Wolff’s mind drifted back to Sepang ’16 — not because this is the same story, but because the feeling inside a team is instantly familiar.
“Super difficult,” Wolff admitted of living through that Hamilton engine failure at the sharp end of a championship. “You’re letting a driver down. Lewis was doing the job, leading, making a gap — and then he blew an engine. That was tough for him and tough for our relationship.”
He even revisited the now-famous “kitchen talk” that followed. “We didn’t speak for a few weeks until I told him, ‘I don’t want a divorce, we just need to talk.’ And I’d handle the end of that season differently today. I wanted to control it.”
There is a crucial difference in 2025: time. With nine races and 225 points still on the table, the door is wide open for a counterpunch. Norris knows it, and so does Wolff. “Certainly a blow to the championship, but not impossible,” he said.
McLaren, meanwhile, remain on a march. The Constructors’ Championship gap to Ferrari is a chasm — 324 points — and the Drivers’ title is down to an in-house duel between Piastri and Norris, with one of them about to become a first-time World Champion. That’s the scale of what went up in smoke at Turn 8.
None of this absolves anyone of the next job. If the failure traces back to the engine bay, expect the pressure to ratchet up at Brixworth to bulletproof the package. If it’s chassis-related, McLaren will be just as ruthless. Titles are rarely lost on pace; they slip away on days like these if you let the sting linger.
For now, Norris has to do what Hamilton did in 2016 after Sepang: take the hit, bank the frustration, and start swinging again. The calendar gives him the chance. The car gives him the tools. The rest is execution — and a little luck, the same kind that deserted him on a breezy Sunday by the North Sea.
