Lando Norris walked out of the Baku paddock on Thursday knowing exactly what the timing screens were telling him. His MCL40 was 1.6 seconds off George Russell’s Mercedes in FP1, and still 1.5 seconds adrift in FP2, where he ended up sixth. Oscar Piastri was just 0.03s further back in eighth, in a session Russell led from teammate Kimi Antonelli, according to Crash.net’s full timesheet.
The world champion did not disguise the mood.
“It’s just a little knife in the heart when you see how far off you are,” Norris told Formula1.com.
He was blunter about the raw number.
“We’re miles off. We are in the position we expected to be in, but at 1.5 seconds off the pace. It’s pretty pants.”
A track built to expose the MCL40
McLaren arrived in Azerbaijan with a substantial upgrade to the MCL40, but the package has done nothing to close the gap. The team ran into trouble immediately, with bargeboard issues on both cars in FP1 forcing cable-tie repairs.
The bigger problem is the layout. Baku combines a long main straight with a series of tight, slow-speed 90-degree corners, and McLaren are losing time in both.
“Mercedes is quicker than us in every slow-speed corner, as we expect, and they’re quicker than us in the straights,” Norris said, in a passage highlighted by The Race.
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McLaren run shorter gear ratios than most rivals, a compromise that helps acceleration out of corners but bleeds performance at the end of Baku’s long straight, as Autosport’s Thursday review set out. Red Bull and Ferrari were within 0.8s and 1.1s of Mercedes respectively, leaving McLaren’s deficit as the anomaly of the day.
Norris sees no fix before qualifying
The car did not feel bad from the cockpit, Norris said, which is what made the deficit hurt.
“The car didn’t feel that bad, so it’s just a little knife in the heart,” he told Sky Sports.
“I don’t really care how confident I am in the car. I just care about the pace, and we’re not very fast.”
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Asked what McLaren could change before qualifying, Norris said flatly he had no idea. Russell, meanwhile, expected only modest movement.
“I’m sure those gaps will tighten even further when we get to qualifying tomorrow,” the Mercedes driver said.
What this costs McLaren in the title fight
Norris trails Antonelli by 106 points with nine rounds remaining. Antonelli, the Mercedes rookie leading the championship, holds an 81-point advantage over Russell.
Piastri sits further back in the standings. Every weekend McLaren fail to score heavily against the two Mercedes drivers, the gap ossifies. A Baku result in the fifth-to-eighth range, which is where Thursday’s pace suggests they will land, is not the sort of afternoon that swings a title fight back.
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Qualifying starts at 4pm local time on Friday. The race is on Saturday at 3pm local time, moved off its usual Sunday slot because the weekend clashes with Azerbaijan’s Remembrance Day on 27 September.
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