Lando Norris suffered same Lewis Hamilton disaster that cost him 2016 F1 title

He is only 34 points behind Oscar Piastri but, as his engine gave up the ghost in the final stages of Sunday's Dutch Grand Prix, did the title hopes of Lando Norris go in smoke with it? Even with nine rounds still to go in the season, it looks to be a long way back for the Brit now.

At no point this season has the gap between the two McLaren drivers been this large. And in a season during which one of them has so often finished directly behind the other at the front of a Grand Prix, it will take Norris a while to narrow the gap again even if he goes on a winning streak.

McLaren have managed seven one-two finishes in 15 Grands Prix so far, but in terms of pace there should have been more. Piastri's mistake in Melbourne cost them one, another slipped away at Zandvoort on Sunday. Monumental qualifying performances from Max Verstappen at Suzuka and Charles Leclerc in Monaco, where overtaking in the race was impossible, denied them on two more occasions.

It is true that one bit of misfortune for Piastri would bring his team-mate right back into it, but reliability problems in modern F1 are far more rare than they once were. Piastri hasn't suffered one all year and has not failed to finish a Grand Prix, for any reason, since the Austin race in October 2023.

Realistically, Piastri is now a couple of wins away from being in a truly imperious position. As Nico Rosberg was after a similar fate to what Norris suffered on Sunday befell Lewis Hamilton at the 2016 Malaysian Grand Prix.

And there are more parallels. Just as has been the case for Norris this term, Hamilton had spent most of the season chasing Rosberg, who had taken an early grip on the championship but had begun to lose ground with his Mercedes team-mate gathering momentum.

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A win at Sepang would have given Hamilton the lead in the title race. Instead, his engine exploded and Rosberg made it to the podium, extending his championship lead to 23 points and giving his team-mate, already a three-time F1 champion at that point, a large mountain to climb.

Rosberg then too victory at the next race at Suzuka to further extend his lead. Hamilton won the final four races left of the season, but it was not enough to close the gap and the German won the title by five points, before promptly and infamously retiring from the sport.

Long-serving Mercedes boss Toto Wolff was in charge at the time and, after Sunday's race at Zandvoort, recalled how he felt for Hamilton at the time. The Austrian said: "[It was] super difficult, because you are letting a driver down. You could maybe say, 'It's a long season and that was a singular instance'. But Lewis was doing the job, leading the race, creating a big gap in the championship and then we blow an engine.

"That was tough for him, and was tough for our relationship. I think this is when I had the kitchen talk with him. We didn't speak to each other for a few weeks until I explained to him that I don't want a divorce. We just need to talk about this. I would have handled the end of the season differently today than I did in the past because we wanted to control it."