McLaren miles off pace in Baku practice - Norris

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Lando Norris was blunt about McLaren’s opening day in Baku. “We’re miles off,” the Briton said after finishing second practice sixth quickest, 1.484 seconds adrift of George Russell’s benchmark 1:43.347. “We’re up there, let’s say, we’re in the position we expected to be in. But I’m 1.5s off the pace. So, pretty pants.”

Asked whether McLaren could recover the deficit before Friday’s qualifying session, Norris shot back: “Do you think we can close 1.5s?”

An upgrade package held together by cable ties

McLaren arrived in Azerbaijan with the most significant hardware change of their season — a package spanning new sidepods, engine cover, floor edge, diffuser and revised rear suspension, aimed squarely at the MCL40’s low-speed weakness. Baku, with its 90-degree corners and tight castle section, was chosen as the place to prove it.

The evaluation barely began. A crack was found in the upgraded floor during first practice, and mechanics resorted to cable ties as a temporary fix while both cars sat in the garage. Norris completed 14 laps and was classified 14th. Oscar Piastri’s running was similarly curtailed, and the Australian ended FP2 eighth, 1.510s off Russell and — pointedly — behind Pierre Gasly’s Alpine.

Team CTO Rob Marshall was more measured than his driver. “I think the car seems to be doing what we want it to do,” he said. “The aero map kind of seems pretty happy, it’s just a matter of dialling in the performance now. It’s early days.”

Norris was not interested in that framing. “The car didn’t feel that bad, so it’s just a little knife in the heart when you see how far off you are,” he said. “I don’t really care how confident I am in the car, I just care about the pace, and we’re not very fast. I drive whatever car I get given, I just want it to be quick, and it’s not very quick at the minute.”

Mercedes sweep a chaotic Thursday

The context for McLaren’s gloom was a Mercedes team that looked untouchable. Russell led both sessions, topping FP1 with a 1:45.387 before improving to 1:43.347 on softs in FP2. Kimi Antonelli made it a one-two, 0.552s back, a considerable recovery given he had lost roughly 35 minutes of FP1 to a hydraulic failure that left him stopped at Turn 7 with smoking brakes and triggered a virtual safety car.

Max Verstappen was third, 0.827s down, despite Red Bull bringing a revised floor and sidepods of their own. Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton completed the top five for Ferrari, 1.126s and 1.318s adrift respectively.

Thursday was unusually disrupted even by Baku standards:

Arvid Lindblad struck the wall in the narrow castle section after 20 minutes of FP2, bringing out the session’s red flag having completed only four laps
Oliver Bearman reported a power unit failure mid-session
Fernando Alonso managed nine laps before a suspected oil leak in his power unit confined him to the garage
Carlos Sainz pitted in FP1 with his rear brakes on fire, while Piastri described brake vibration as “twice as bad” as anything he had previously experienced

Why the gap may not be what it seems

There are caveats. Norris aborted laps in both sessions that looked set to improve his time, and McLaren were still optimising the update rather than chasing a representative qualifying simulation. Baku’s low-grip surface evolves more dramatically across a weekend than almost any circuit on the calendar, and Thursday practice form there has a long record of misleading.

Russell, for his part, expects the picture to change. “I’m sure those gaps will tighten even further when we get to qualifying tomorrow,” he said.

The compressed Baku schedule leaves McLaren little room. With FP2 already complete on Thursday, qualifying follows at 13:00 on Friday and the race at midday on Saturday — a single overnight window to turn a damaged floor and an unproven aero package into something raceable.

The championship arithmetic sharpens the point. Antonelli leads on 292 points from Russell on 211, Hamilton on 191 and Norris on 186. That is a 106-point deficit for Norris with nine rounds remaining — recoverable, but not while conceding a second and a half a lap to the car in front of him. McLaren brought their biggest upgrade of the year to Azerbaijan precisely to stop that arithmetic hardening. On the evidence of day one, it has not yet worked.

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