Baku bit back on Friday, and Lando Norris felt the teeth marks.
McLaren’s championship push didn’t exactly purr through opening practice at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, with both cars flirting with the walls and Norris parking FP2 early after a brush with Turn 4 that knocked his suspension out of shape. He crabbed the MCL38 back to the garage and, with it, his chance to log the long-run data everyone covets around here.
“Scrappy” was his verdict. Hard to argue.
The warning signs were already out in FP1. Oscar Piastri spent much of the session parked with a power unit issue, then later picked up a reprimand for a yellow-flag infringement. By FP2, the walls were cashing the cheques. Piastri tapped one, Norris another, and McLaren’s tidy Thursday plan went into the shredder.
Norris narrowly dodged the fence at Turn 2 before misjudging the margins two corners later. The hit wasn’t dramatic, but it was damaging enough to skew the rear and end his day. Frustrating for a driver who, as ever in Baku, was trying to find the line between bold and too bold.
He didn’t hide it afterward: annoying, costly, but also the kind of mistake that comes when you’re pushing to learn. What stings most is the missed high-fuel work on Pirelli’s softer compound this weekend, a change that shifts the balance at a street track that’s already evolved into a quicker layout versus last year. If you’re not banking laps here, you’re guessing.
Ferrari set the tone with headline speed in FP2, and Norris was quick to circle them as the benchmark on Friday. He also lobbed a familiar warning about Red Bull, who rarely tip their hand until it matters. If you’ve covered enough of these, you’ve heard the tune: they snooze on Friday, they sting on Saturday.
The scorecard? McLaren actually looked sharp in FP1 despite Piastri’s hiccups and a long red flag, then faded when it came time for the traditional qualifying sims—Norris wound up 10th in FP2, Piastri 12th. That’s not panic material in Baku, where slipstream games, yellow flags and timing-luck can turn the order inside out. But it’s also not the sort of clean Friday that lets a team roll into Saturday with a grin.
Under the paint, the story is more nuanced. McLaren’s one-lap snapshots suggested the car has pace in hand—Norris said as much before meeting the wall—but the run plan was compromised, and the softer rubber complicates tyre life on those long, sunbaked straights. You want your high-fuel read especially for a race that can go safety-car to sprint race in a blink, then revert to chess over the final 15 laps.
Piastri, for his part, looked slightly more on edge even before the reprimand, working through a car that didn’t seem to give him the same confidence mid-corner. That’s fixable overnight. The bigger concern is gathering enough data to make the right calls on wing level and tyre protection as the track rubbers in. McLaren know the drill; Baku rewards patience as much as bravado.
The intrigue for Saturday is layered. Ferrari’s low-fuel pops looked tidy and the car rotated well through the city’s slower middle sector. Red Bull, historically, build into the weekend. And McLaren? Plenty to find, but nothing here suggests their ceiling has lowered. Norris is still driving with the authority of a man who expects to fight at the front when the grip comes to him. He just needs to keep the car out of the walls long enough to show it.
So yes, a messier Friday than the orange garage would have liked. It won’t define their weekend. But it did hand the initiative to Maranello for now, and in a title fight where momentum has started to matter, that’s a baton you don’t want to pass without a scrap.
Saturday brings answers. And usually, in Baku, a little more chaos.
