Norris left to rue late lock-up as Baku upgrade leaves him short of the front
Formula One's Baku weekend has been running a day ahead of itself all along, with qualifying pushed forward to Friday and the Azerbaijan Grand Prix itself brought forward to Saturday so as not to clash with the country's Remembrance Day on Sunday. That gave McLaren's new-look car its first real test in Thursday's practice sessions, and the characteristics of the Baku City Circuit did little to flatter it early on.
That car arrived in Baku carrying a sizeable upgrade package, but the characteristics of the Baku City Circuit did little to flatter it early on. Norris had been candid on Thursday about the scale of the deficit he was facing, and the sense heading into Friday was of a driver trying to find performance that simply was not there yet.
Qualifying told a slightly kinder story. George Russell took a commanding pole for Mercedes, with Oscar Piastri splitting the front two rows in third for McLaren and Norris rounding out the top five, just over a second off the pace. It was progress, and a Q3 lock-up on his final run meant it could have been better still.
Asked afterwards how the car had felt in the top-ten shootout, Norris made clear the pace had genuinely improved by then. "Yeah, a little bit," he said, when asked about the lock-up itself. "At that point I was already up a little bit through the first two corners."
He explained why he had been willing to take the risk in the first place: "I don't think a P1 was possible today because George did an amazing job, but I'd rather push for a P1 or P2 and make a mistake than settle for a P5 or a P3 or P4." As he summed it up, "it is sometimes a long way off, but we're still thereabouts."
Pushed on whether McLaren had identified a clear fix for the car's shortcomings, Norris was quick to defend his own side of the equation. "Honestly, I feel like I've still been driving very, very well this weekend," he said, "just some problems that we have with the car that limit my lap time a little bit." He was not expecting a quick turnaround before Saturday's race.
"Hopefully we can fix them - we're probably not going to fix them tomorrow, which means we're in for a tough race." Asked to be specific about where the gap was coming from, he did not hedge. "We've got some things we need to fix on the car, because I just had a deficit to the other car at the minute."
It left a picture of a Friday that was better than the practice sessions promised but still not quite enough - close enough to the front to justify the gamble of pushing hard in Q3, not clean enough on the final lap to cash it in, and a car that, by Norris's own admission, still owes him more before Saturday's grid drops the flag in Baku.
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