It is Stoffel Vandoorne’s home race this weekend in Belgium, and there is good news and bad news for the young driver. The good news is that he’s been re-signed at McLaren for an undisclosed period of time. Chief Zak Brown said: “Let me put it this way, when we signed Stoffel, we intended that he would race for us for a significant number of years, and that remains our firm intention.”

Stoffel added: “I’m delighted that the team has now formally announced that I will continue to race for them next year, because I’ll be able to approach the second half of my rookie season with total focus on the job in hand: namely getting the very most I can out of my car, my engineers, and everything and everyone around me.”

Unfortunately, and this is the bad news, the next race is at Spa, where Stoffel is taking a 35 place grid penalty for using an upgraded Honda engine. That certainly will give him something to focus on.

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