Piastri 'drops ball' but did Norris miss opportunity?

Lando Norris finished where he started - in seventh - in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix

In the context of their battle for the Formula 1 World Championship, Lando Norris needed a weekend in which his McLaren team-mate Oscar Piastri dropped the ball.

He got one - but managed to pull back only six points on the Australian with a seventh-place finish in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, a long way behind Red Bull's Max Verstappen, who took his second dominant victory in a row.

Was this a missed opportunity, as Norris kept being asked over the course of Saturday and Sunday in Baku, and kept denying? Or did the Briton do the best he could in a difficult set of circumstances?

After the race, Norris pointed to qualifying on Saturday as the root of the issue.

Because overtaking was close to impossible, he said, qualifying had dictated his race result. And he did indeed finish exactly where he started.

In the most interrupted qualifying session in F1 history, with a record six red flags as a result of a series of crashes in very difficult conditions, both McLaren drivers struggled.

Piastri crashed - and ended up ninth on the grid. Norris had the chance to qualify well, but could manage only seventh.

He blamed his decision to go out first for the final three minutes of qualifying, after the final stoppage, saying the drivers who ran behind him got better conditions.

There had been a little rain, the track had a sheen to it, so it's certainly true that each driver along would have had better conditions than the one before. And Verstappen, who took pole, was second last to run.

But Liam Lawson, Carlos Sainz and George Russell, who left the pits just behind Norris, all set quicker times than him in slower cars. And Norris hurt his chances by hitting the wall at Turn 15. He continued, but only after losing time.

Was this a missed opportunity, Norris was asked? "No," he said, "because I still did everything I could."

Norris had gone first on that run to avoid the risk of being affected by any further incident. But McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said the timing of the lap was not the problem.

"We are still happy with this decision (to run first)," Stella said a couple of hours later.

"We knew that we might have given away a little bit of lap time. But for us the most important thing was actually to make sure that we could deliver a robust lap, let's say.

"Actually, as a matter of fact, we didn't. But for reasons that don't necessarily have to do with the grip on track. It was a little misjudgement by Lando and he touched the wall."

In other words, Norris had not delivered on the potential of the car in qualifying, even allowing for slightly compromised circumstances.

Doing "everything I could" is not, in this case, the same as "my best possible performance".

The moment Norris hit the wall at Turn 15 in the final session of qualifying

'No other driver could have scored more'

Fast forward 24 hours, and Norris summed up his race this way: "I don't really care how people look at it. Of course I wanted to do better today. I needed to do better yesterday. But we went out first. This was just our decision. We paid the price for that.

"I also could have ended up in the wall and gone long and something worse happened. I feel like I was close to maximising today. It didn't maybe look like it from the outside.

"The tricky conditions, the water yesterday, the little bit of rain, going out first on track, all added up to making it a worse weekend. Our position today, if I started second, I think I would have finished second."

Stella agreed that, once he started where he did, Norris' race went about as well as it could have.

"We did not offer Lando a car that was in condition to progress through the field," he said. "And I think actually Lando had a good race.

"He stayed out of trouble, he was clean, but there was not enough pace.

"Lando had a strong race. He raced to the limit of the potential that was available in the car. I think no other driver in Lando's car could have scored more."

Although now within a race victory of Piastri, Norris accepts that the championship is still an uphill struggle.

"I'm doing the best I can," he said. "I've still got a lot of points to make up against a pretty good driver. An incredible driver. I just need to keep my head down."

'Far too many mistakes' from Piastri

Piastri's crash in Baku was his first retirement since the 2023 United States Grand Prix, in his first F1 season

Any assessment of Piastri's weekend was less nuanced. This was, as Stella put it, a "definitely uncharacteristic" performance from the Australian.

Piastri has been the epitome of solidity this season, but in Baku it was like a different driver was in the car.

His practice sessions were littered with small errors. He crashed in qualifying. He made a false start. That put him last at the first corner as the field streamed past after he had to stop again and the car went into anti-stall. And then he crashed after just five corners, misjudging a passing attempt on the Haas of Esteban Ocon.

"You're never going to feel amazing after a weekend like this," he said. "But, ultimately, I felt like the pace has still been good this weekend. And it's rare that I have so many executional 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. So obviously costly errors, but things that could be very, very easily rectified."

It was not, he insisted, due to the pressure of the title battle finally beginning to tell at the start of the series of long-haul venues that finish the season.

"If I felt like I was in a completely different headspace, then it's kind of easier to blame it on that. And also a problem to rectify, I guess," Piastri said.

"But this weekend's felt like any other weekend. Just unfortunately, there's been far too many mistakes from start to finish. You know, every single session has been messy."

Where has McLaren's pace gone?

The obvious question in the context of Norris' qualifying error, and Piastri's weekend of them, is what went wrong?

Norris felt he had an answer to that.

"The car was difficult to drive, on a bit of a knife's edge at times," he said. "Easy to either be just too slow, sometimes kind of feel like you're there, and then mess up and then something goes wrong.

"The car didn't fill us with a lot of confidence this weekend, and I think that showed from probably both of our performances."

Stella said that McLaren had expected Baku to be a difficult weekend.

"If you had asked me what is the most difficult weekend, I would have said it could be Baku or Las Vegas, one of the two," he said.

"We know very well that our car is very competitive in long, medium-speed corners, of which we have none here in Baku; likewise in Vegas. The car is not particularly effective in straight-line braking, of which you have a lot here."

The McLaren is also not at its most efficient in a low-downforce set-up - which is needed for both Baku and Monza. It's much more suited to the tracks that demand more downforce - as in the case of the next event in Singapore on 3-5 October.

Is Verstappen a threat?

Verstappen has now led more laps this season (282) than Norris (241)

Verstappen provided a stark contrast to the McLaren drivers in Baku. Error-free, he delivered a perfect weekend, taking pole, the win and fastest lap.

On Saturday, Stella had insisted that the Dutchman was still a threat in the drivers' championship - "yes, in capital letters," he said, despite the fact that Verstappen at the time was 94 points adrift of Piastri.

Now, he's 69 behind. Still a lot - Verstappen needs to score an average of nearly 10 points a race more than Piastri to overtake him by the end of the season.

It's a long shot, to say the least, and Verstappen says he's "not thinking about it".

Stella pointed out that a new floor introduced at Monza had improved the Red Bull car, but also put the result in the context of track characteristics and the cars' respective strengths and weaknesses.

"We will see now in Singapore, which should be more of one in which we should perform well," Stella said. "Hopefully we can go back to fighting for victories and then we will see how the rest of the championship will unfold.

"But definitely Max is in the contention for the drivers' championship. We knew it and we got confirmation today."

Ferrari's Charles Leclerc summed the situation up well.

"Max is not leaving anything on the table, that for sure," Leclerc said. "They've done a big step forward with the car and they are now at a very strong level as well.

"It's not been a very smooth weekend for McLaren in the last two weekends so I don't think that Red Bull is now dominating again.

"It's very close between McLaren and Red Bull but Max is doing a better job at the moment."