Lando Norris was left ruing yet more unreliability after losing fifth place at the Belgian Grand Prix.

The Briton had benefitted from the incidents at La Source on Lap 1 and built up a massive lead over the rest of the midfield during the race, only for more engine issues to hit and finally end his race less than one lap from the finish.

“I just lost power, simple as that, an engine failure or something,” Norris told reporters. “So not our fault as a team but it’s just annoying.

“It’s happened quite a few times this year, especially when we’ve had some good results. This was going to be P5, my best result, from P11 on a weekend where we have struggled quite a bit.

“But other people are in worse situations than I am so I can’t be too disappointed with what happened.”

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The McLaren driver has seen four races impacted by mechanical failure, including losing a similar result in France and only regaining ninth after a post-race penalty for Daniel Ricciardo.

Up until that point, however, even the 19-year-old stated the race had been "plain sailing".

“I’ve been not so good on the first couple of laps let’s say so far this year,” he admitted. “That was one of the things over the summer break that I needed to improve on, my Turn 1, Turn 2 situations.

“I overtook six cars into Turn 1 and it went very well. From then on [Romain] Grosjean was behind for a few laps but as soon as we started to push, we had really good pace in the car.

“There is a lot of positives. Although it was a plain sailing race for us, we still had to do the pit stops and still had to manage things, manage fuel and so on.”

Teammate Carlos Sainz also retired after just one slow lap of Spa-Francorchamps as he too suffered an engine problem.