McLaren’s pit crew fumbled again in Baku, and it cost Lando Norris a shot at the sharp end on a day the title picture swung wide open.
While championship leader Oscar Piastri stuck it in the wall on lap one — an unusually heavy unforced error from the Australian — Norris couldn’t cash in. The Brit had pace, a sensible long first stint, and a strategy that should’ve slingshotted him clear of traffic. Instead, a sticky front-right wheel nut turned a clean release into a four-second stop on lap 37. Cue the DRS snake, cue the frustration.
“It’s the front-right gun which struggled to tighten up the wheel nut,” noted Sky F1’s Karun Chandhok, watching the moment Norris’s race tilted. “He would have cleared this whole pack of cars.” Clear the pack and you’re in different company — and maybe different conversations post-race.
Norris rejoined behind Charles Leclerc, picked off the Ferrari, then spent the closing laps staring at the back of Liam Lawson’s Racing Bulls with Yuki Tsunoda’s Red Bull up the road. P7 at the flag, six points banked, and the nagging sense it should’ve been more.
This wasn’t a one-off. In Monza, the front-left delayed Norris to a 5.9s stop and handed P2 to Piastri. McLaren covered it off with a team switch that set the internet alight. Seven days later, same issue, different corner. For a team that’s clocked a joint-fastest 1.94s stop this season with both drivers, the variance is painful.
Former Aston Martin strategist Bernie Collins spelled it out. “He should have come out ahead of Leclerc and Tsunoda. Then he missed the opportunity to undercut Lawson,” she said. “Even without any other overtakes, he should have been P5 without that slow pit stop. It was very costly.
“He would have had a much better chance at [Kimi] Antonelli and [Carlos] Sainz if he had been ahead of Lawson. McLaren are going to look at that pit stop and think it was very, very detrimental to their day. It’s also the second race in a row they have had a slow pit stop. That’s something they need to get on top of.”
The Sainz bit is the sting. Ferrari managed their race smartly and Sainz bagged the final podium, but on outright pace and tyre life, Norris had the platform to at least put the Spaniard under pressure. Instead, the McLaren was trapped, chewing hot air in Baku’s long tunnel of DRS.
Andrea Stella wasn’t biting. The McLaren team principal acknowledged the miscue but pushed back on how much it changed the story. “We still have to check whether, even with the fastest pit stop, we could have been ahead or not of a Ferrari,” he said in Baku. “We managed to overtake and regain this position, which was good. It was important for the points and for Lando’s championship.
“But definitely in terms of pit stops, that’s an area in which we have already concentrated our efforts. We need to keep working because there’s some important performance that is available through pit stops. The racing is getting tighter and tighter, so the impact of a pit stop now gets more and more important.”
He told Sky Deutschland the team will review the front-right issue and “polish” their processes. They’ll have to. With seven race weekends to go, the margins are microscopic and the consequences are loud.
On the macro scale, Baku should’ve been a gift for Norris. Piastri’s lap-one exit left clear air in the title chase; instead, Norris’s damage limitation run keeps him 25 points behind his teammate. That’s not fatal with a third of the season left, but it’s the kind of weekend that lingers in a debrief — especially when it’s the second in a row decided by a wheel gun.
The pace is there. The fastest-stop capability is there. The execution is not. In a field where Ferrari and Mercedes have sharpened their edges and Red Bull never needs a second invite, that’s the difference between joining the podium interviews and queuing behind a Racing Bulls.
One more note: this wasn’t a driver baulking passes or a strategy that missed the moment. Norris did the hard bit with the long opener and had the legs to make ground. Baku simply punished the only mistake that mattered. And after Monza, that mistake is starting to look like a trend.
The fix isn’t rocket science — standardize the gun torque, rehearse the release timing, kill the outliers. But it needs to happen now. Because if McLaren really are playing for a championship with both cars, leaving points buried in a DRS train is the slowest way to lose one.
