The Red Bull Formula 1 car was “unbelievably fast” in some parts of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, declared Lando Norris, after not only watching Max Verstappen dominate in Baku but failing to pass Yuki Tsunoda for sixth late in the race.
McLaren’s awful Baku weekend continued from its messy qualifying session into an even worse race in which Norris finished where he qualified in seventh and championship leader Oscar Piastri crashed out on the first lap.
Verstappen’s win was his and Red Bull’s second in a row, the first time that's happened since June of last year, and brings him to within 44 points of Norris for second in the drivers’ championship and 69 off leader Piastri with seven rounds left.
Asked by The Race about whether his unproductive race was just a consequence of being stuck in a DRS train mid-pack, Norris replied that McLaren had its problems but Red Bull was simply much faster.
“I don’t think we were bad but I could barely keep up with Tsunoda and there were parts of the track where the Red Bull was just unbelievably fast,” said Norris.
“I had no chance to keep up with him in some areas of the track.
“We clearly struggled a little bit this weekend and in this race. The car was difficult to drive, on a bit of a knife edge at times. Easy to either just be too slow, or sometimes you’d kind of feel like you were there and then you’d lock up and something goes wrong.
“The car didn’t fill us with a lot of confidence this weekend.”
Red Bull didn’t win a grand prix between Imola and May and Monza a fortnight ago, but Norris said its decline had been overestimated.
“It’s not often that they’re slow, so people need to stop being so surprised that they’re quick,” he said.
“Max was winning races already at the beginning of the year. The whole season they’ve been quick and the Red Bull’s been good. They’ve brought some upgrades to Monza, which seemed to have helped them even more.
“So I’m not surprised. We know that they’re an incredibly strong team with one of the best drivers ever in Formula 1. So we expect nothing less. They’re going to make our life difficult I think for the rest of the season.
“But we also know from our side, we struggled a bit here, Monza clearly we were not quick enough. We’ve made improvements but things where the Red Bull has been so good and dominant in the past, they still have and we don’t. Today when I was following the Red Bull there were clearly some areas where they were at another level to us. We need to understand why.”
Asked by The Race if he felt McLaren’s Baku performance was a one-off, Norris replied: “I don’t think they were big struggles, I think on ultimate pace we were still not bad this weekend. I was still quick in FP1, FP2, FP3 and so forth. If it was a normal qualifying… I think the tricky conditions, the water, the little bit of rain, going out first, all added up to making it a worse weekend and our position today.
“If I had started second, I think I would have finished second. I don’t think we had the pace of Red Bull, honestly. That was very, very clear.
“But I think just on the lower-downforce tracks we still seem to struggle. We don’t have the confidence we need. We can be quick, we’re just not able to repeat it as often as we need to and as often as the Red Bull, for example.
“We’ve had an amazing season, don’t get me wrong, but we clearly have things that are not good enough and that we have to keep working on.”
Piastri’s messy weekend
Having already crashed in qualifying, Piastri’s race got worse immediately when he ensured a jump-start penalty, then actually started slowly while trying - too late - to stop his car inching forward, then crashed out trying to make up ground.
He put that down to “just ultimately misjudging the grip level” and accepted it was a simple driving error.
“Probably a little bit from dirty air, but I know better than that and to expect the lack of grip,” said Piastri. “I’m certainly not blaming it on anything else. It was two simple errors on my behalf.”
The championship leader took some comfort from the errors being rare, insisting there was nothing in his mindset or the car’s behaviour that contributed to them and that this made it easier to move on from.
“Obviously we’re not going to feel amazing after a weekend like this,” he said.
“But ultimately I felt like the pace has still been good this weekend.
“I think it’s rare that I have so many execution errors so I’m very much focused on putting that behind me.
“I would be much more concerned if these errors were because I was trying to make up time or do things like that. I think they are obviously costly errors but are things that can be very, very easily rectified."
Verstappen a title threat?
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella suggested on Saturday even before Verstappen’s win that he was likely to be a factor in the title fight.
Asked if he felt that was the case, Piastri replied: “I don’t know. I’m not going to rule him out. But I’m honestly not too concerned with that.
“I’m just trying to bounce back from this weekend and put in the best performances that I can and I know if I get back to where I can be, I’ll be more than OK, so that’s what I’m going to focus my energy on.”
He saw both “positives and negatives” for his own title bid in having Verstappen back at the front too.
“It can go both ways for you. If Max is in the middle and I’m ahead, then it’s good for me. If it’s the opposite way then that’s bad for me,” mulled Piastri.
“But ultimately I want to make sure that my performances are at the level that they should be and then I’ll let the rest play out as it will.”
Verstappen himself reckons he still faces too big a gap.
"I don't rely on hope but it's seven rounds left, 69 points is a lot so I personally don't think about it but I just go race by race, doing what I have been doing basically the whole season, just trying to do the best we can, try to score the most points that we can, and then after Abu Dhabi, we'll know,” he said.
