Missed opportunity or wrong call? Why Lando Norris couldn’t benefit from Oscar Piastri’s Baku F1 crash

McLaren’s Lando Norris doesn’t see his seventh place on the Azerbaijan Grand Prix grid as a missed opportunity to claw back his Formula 1 deficit to championship-leading team-mate Oscar Piastri.

Piastri crashed out in Q3, which relegated the Australian to ninth on the grid. With Norris having to make up a 31-point gap in the standings, the incident gave the Briton an opportunity to put some distance between himself and his title rival on the grid to gain as many points as possible.

But Norris only managed seventh on his final flyer, meaning he will start directly in front of Piastri on Sunday while Max Verstappen overhauled Carlos Sainz to deny Williams a shock pole.

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Norris slipped up in Turn 15 – which had already claimed Charles Leclerc – costing him valuable tenths. But overall, the McLaren driver struggled for grip as he conceded over a second to Verstappen’s Red Bull, which he ascribed to his decision to be the first car in line for the final Q3 run, just as light rain further disrupted the chaotic session.

That’s why Norris strongly dismissed suggestions that Saturday was a missed opportunity. “No, because I still did everything I could,” he replied philosophically. “If I’d won every race, I could be world champion by now. But I didn’t, you know?

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Formula 1 via Getty Images

“I went out first and it was just the wrong decision to make in the end. If everyone else got a yellow [flag] behind because someone else went off behind me, you wouldn’t be asking me this question. Sometimes it goes your way around here, sometimes it doesn’t.

“We thought we took a better option. I think it would have been if it wasn’t spitting, but it just started to spit again before the final run and then going out first is just the incorrect thing.

“It’s something we’ll learn from, but the opportunity is there every single weekend to be on pole. I try and do that every weekend, and today I struggled more because of not making the best decision. But that’s a hindsight thing, not an incorrect one at the time.”

Given his own plight that denied him a shot at starting much higher up, Norris wasn’t surprised by the record number of six red flags as heavy gusts of wind from the Caspian Sea wreaked havoc on a two-hour qualifying session.

“Quite incredible,” he said. “I wish everyone could understand how difficult it was with the wind. I would say half the crashes you saw today were probably because of wind.

“Turn 4, where [Franco] Colapinto went off, a lot of people locked up. It feels like one of the worst corners I’ve ever driven in my life, just because of the 50km/h tailwinds. And the next lap it might be only 10km/h, and you feel like: ‘Oh, I can go a bit quicker.’ You go quicker the next lap, and you’re in the wall.”

Norris in the dark on long-run pace

Lando Norris, McLaren

Photo by: Ozan Kose / AFP via Getty Images

Starting from seventh and ninth, Norris and Piastri will have a mountain to climb to challenge Verstappen, who looked every bit as strong on long runs, on Sunday. And Norris felt that even in a straight fight the reigning world champion would have been hard to beat for the McLarens, who have looked a handful to drive.

“Hopefully it’ll be a good watch, but I think we weren’t running at the pace to beat Max,” he explained. “He’s just going to be fast, but he’s been quick all weekend. They could easily win at Monza, they could easily win again here. I’m not sure about the win, but we’re trying to get on the podium.

“There’s a good amount of cars ahead that are probably a little bit out of position, but it’s not an easy track to overtake on. Charles was a lot quicker than Oscar last year, yet Oscar still won.

“I’ve not done any high-fuel running, so I’ve got a lot of questions I still need to answer and look into Oscar’s long runs. I’ve got a long night ahead of me.”