‘Missed chance’? Norris shrugs off chatter after Baku as Verstappen turns the screw
Lando Norris heard the noise before he left parc fermé. Oscar Piastri, the teammate who leads this championship, went out on Lap 1. Max Verstappen won again. Surely this was Norris’ cue to land a heavy punch?
He doesn’t see it that way.
“I don’t really care how people look at it,” Norris said after finishing second in Baku. “I’m doing the best I can in every race. If you look at it like that, every race I finished second or worse this year was an opportunity lost. So I don’t really care.”
It was a terse answer to an obvious storyline. Piastri’s rare messy weekend opened the door; Norris’ P2 barely nudged the title picture. And Verstappen, rattling off another win, is back applying pressure to both McLarens.
The frustration for Norris is that little about Sunday suggested there was a win on the table once Verstappen cleared Turn 1. McLaren had already put themselves on the back foot the day before with a qualifying call that left them exposed to a rapidly improving circuit.
“We went out first in qualifying,” Norris said. “That was our decision, and we paid the price for that. Of course I wanted to do better today. I needed to do better yesterday.”
From there, the race ran into the usual Baku headwinds—dirty air, narrow margins, and a Red Bull that’s rediscovered some menace. Norris stalked, measured, and kept it clean. Risk the wall and maybe you walk out with nothing; bank the points and live to fight the next one.
“I also could have ended up in the wall and something worse happened,” he added. “I feel like I was close to maximising today. Maybe it didn’t look like it from the outside, but we struggled with the pace. We weren’t too optimistic about our race pace. Clearly, we struggled a little bit. I don’t think the pace is bad, it’s just too difficult to overtake.”
There’s been a slight shift in the paddock over the past few weeks. The early-season storyline of McLaren’s relentless execution—punctuated by Piastri’s consistency—has blurred a touch. Red Bull, armed with its Monza package and a cleaner run operationally, has dragged itself back into the middle of everything. Norris isn’t shocked.
“I think people need to stop being so surprised that they’re quick,” he said. “Max was winning races already at the beginning of the year. He could have won round one. 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, so not a surprise. We know they’re an incredibly strong team with one of the best drivers ever in Formula 1. We expect nothing less. They’re going to make our life difficult for the rest of the season.”
That’s the crux for McLaren: on days when the margins are razor-thin—low drag, high top speed, or tracks that punish any loss of traction—Red Bull still has weapons. Following Verstappen around Baku, Norris saw it up close.
“When I was following the Red Bull, there were clearly some areas where they were just another level to us,” he said. “We’ve made improvements, but where Red Bull have been so good and dominant in the past, they still have—and we don’t.”
The title math doesn’t panic Norris. The calendar is still long, and the McLaren camp knows the points swing both ways when chaos strikes. But there was a bit of steel in his voice too—a recognition that this championship won’t be won on perfect Sundays alone, but by minimizing damage on the imperfect ones.
“I’m doing the best I can,” he said. “I know I still have a lot of points to make up against a pretty good driver—an incredible driver—so I just need to keep my head up.”
Baku won’t go down as a grand slam or a breakthrough. It was a solid, unspectacular salvage job on a weekend that started on the wrong foot and quickly turned weird. Verstappen left with momentum. Piastri left with nothing. And Norris left with a reminder of F1’s oldest truth: sometimes second is what keeps you in the fight.
