Lando Norris has rejected claims that he wasted a golden chance to slash Oscar Piastri’s championship lead in Baku, insisting his measured seventh place was about maximising what McLaren had on the day rather than dwelling on what could have been.
With Piastri crashing out on the opening lap of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix after a messy weekend, Norris walked away with six points trimmed from the gap – reducing the deficit to 25 as the season heads into its final seven rounds.
For some, that looked like a big missed opportunity, but the cool-headed racer dismissed that narrative with a shrug and a steely resolve.
“I’m doing the best I can in every race,” Norris said after the flag. “If you look at that, every race I finished second or worse this year was an opportunity lost. I don’t really care how people look at it.
“Of course, I needed to do better yesterday but we went out first. This was just our decision and we paid the price for that.
“I also could have ended up in the wall and gone long and something worse happened. I felt like I was close to maximising today, it didn’t maybe look like it from the outside but we struggled with the pace.”
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A slow 4.1s pit stop compounded his challenge, but Norris made clear McLaren’s race speed was the limiting factor.
“We weren’t too optimistic about our pace today,” he admitted. “Clearly, we struggled a little bit. I don’t think the pace is bad, it’s just too difficult to overtake.
“I’m doing the best I can. I know 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.”
A Weekend of What-Ifs
The Briton’s frustration was tempered by the fact that, on pure pace, McLaren never looked like matching Max Verstappen’s Red Bull. Norris had shown promise earlier in the weekend by topping FP1 and FP3, only to be caught out by Saturday’s chaotic qualifying session with six red flags and spits of rain.
“I don’t think they were big struggles,” Norris said. “I think on ultimate pace we were still not bad this weekend, I was still quick in FP1, FP2, FP3 and so forth.
“I think if it was a normal quali, yes. The tricky conditions, the water yesterday, the little bit of rain going up first on track, all added up to making it a worse weekend. Our position today, I think if I 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. I think just the lower-downforce tracks, we still seem to struggle.
“We still don’t have the confidence we need. It 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 we have to keep working on them.”
Respect for Verstappen and Red Bull
With Verstappen storming to his fourth victory of 2025 – and his second in succession – Norris was quick to remind fans that Red Bull’s dominance has hardly gone away.
“It’s not often that they’re slow,” Norris said. “So I think people need to stop being so surprised that they’re quick.
“Max was winning races already at the beginning of the year, he could have won round one, I think he was pretty close to winning round two.
“The whole season they’ve been quick, the Red Bull has been good, they brought some upgrades to Monza which seems to have helped them improve even more.
“So, not a surprise, I think we know that they’re an incredibly strong team and have 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’re not quick enough.
“We’ve made improvements but things where the Red Bull have been so good and dominant in the past, they still have and we don’t.
“Today when I was following the Red Bull, there was clearly some areas where they were just another level to us and we need to understand why,” he concluded.
As the season barrels toward its climax, Norris is keeping his focus on the fight ahead. Trailing Piastri by 25 points with seven races to go, he knows the road to the world title is steep –but he’s ready to climb.
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