‘Treacherous’ Lando Norris crash explained after early Las Vegas GP exit

Le Mans winner Richard Bradley has delved into the reasons behind why Lando Norris was sent into a “violent” spin into a concrete wall in Las Vegas on Saturday night.

Norris collided with a wall heading through Turn 11 in a surprising incident early on in the Las Vegas Grand Prix, before sliding on into the Tecpro barriers at Turn 12 and requiring precautionary checks in hospital afterwards.

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella later revealed that a large bump through Turn 11 proved to be the culprit, and Bradley shed more light on how that can prove to upset cars in such a way.

Lando Norris crash: 80% downforce ‘completely cut’ when car bottoms out

With the cars full of fuel and running lower tyre pressures to maximise the available downforce to them during the race in Las Vegas, Bradley explained that the effects of ‘bottoming out’, when a car’s floor scrapes along the ground, are heightened.

That in turn is enough to upset the balance of the car significantly, which will have proven costly for Norris, as the large bump through Turn 11 in Las Vegas showed.

Team boss Stella requested that this area of the track is flattened in time for next year’s edition of the race after a huge crash for his driver, and the 2015 Le Mans 24 Hours winner said there was not much Norris could have done to stop the crash once he went over the bump in the way he did.

“To be honest with you, it was something that I worried about when I watched the onboard from Free Practice 1,” Bradley explained on the newest episode of the On Track GP Podcast, produced in collaboration between DR Sports and PlanetF1.com.

“The one area you can tell when a Formula 1 car’s hitting the ground is you get these bright wood-coloured marks on the tarmac, which is where they’re scraping.

“You can see they were scraping from Free Practice 1 which is when they’re not pushing, they’re running conservative ride heights and everything, and on that sort of corner where you’ve got a car bottoming out like that, it’s very, very nerve wracking.

“When you’re in qualifying, you’ve got really high tyre pressures, peak performance, massive grip from new tyres, low fuel, you don’t care about it, you just crack on.

“But in a racing situation, basically you want to keep the car as low as possible to get as much downforce as possible – but of course that’s affected by the tyre pressures.

“Obviously with it being cold and the slower laps and slow starts, low energy through the tyres etc., the tyres don’t come up to pressure as quickly as normal, which means because the tyres don’t have as much air in them, the car is running at a lower level.

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“That means when the car bottoms out, it stays bottomed out for a longer amount of time, which means the downforce from the floor, which is about 80% of the total downforce, is completely cut – and that’s why corners where you have bumps in the middle of it are really, really treacherous.

“So it’s one of those things where if you’re not on a corner where the car’s bottoming out, you have normal grip. To be honest, at low [tyre] pressures you probably have more grip if anything, but on those high-speed corners where you bottom out it just snaps, and there’s nothing you can do.

“I’m really happy to see Lando’s okay because I’ve hit a concrete wall before and they absolutely suck. It’s not the pain, it’s just the violence of it.

“Any impact with a concrete wall, when you actually watch it on TV, you look at it and go ‘oh, that doesn’t look too bad’.

“If you watch it in slow motion, it’s frightening and as I said, fortunately I’ve only hit one once at slow speed, but God it hurt.”

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