‘We’re miles off’ – Norris left with ‘knife in the heart’ feeling after McLaren’s low-key start in Azerbaijan

Lando Norris has described his and McLaren’s deficit to the front of the field during Thursday practice at the Baku City Circuit as “a little knife in the heart”, with the team “miles off” the pace as things stand.

McLaren endured a disrupted start to the Azerbaijan weekend due to floorboard issues on their upgraded MCL40 through FP1 – Norris and team mate Oscar Piastri losing track time as mechanics worked on a fix.

Heading back out for second practice with a makeshift solution in the form of cable ties, Norris and Piastri were at least able to get some more laps on the board, but the pair wound up around 1.5 seconds behind pace-setter George Russell.

Reflecting on Thursday’s running, having backed out of a stronger lap late in FP2, Norris sighed: “We’re miles off. I mean, we’re up there, let’s say, relative… We’re in the position we expected to be in, but at 1.5 seconds off the pace. It’s pretty pants.”

Asked how much of that gap can realistically be closed overnight, he said: “I have no idea. We’ll see what work we can do. 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.”

In terms of how he is feeling behind the wheel more generally, Norris added: “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 don’t care. I drive whatever car I get given, I just want it to be quick, and it’s not very quick at the minute. We’ll see what we can change for tomorrow.”

Also speaking to the media post-session was McLaren’s Chief Technical Officer and Chief Designer Rob Marshall, who explained what went wrong on their cars in FP1 – and how their updates otherwise performed.

“We put a lot of new bits on the car today,” he said, with changes being made to the sidepods, engine cover, floor, diffuser and rear suspension. “A lot of learning, a few cliches... I could roll a few more out... but obviously you put your package on and you need to learn how to dial it in. I don’t think we’re there yet.

“I think the car seems to be doing what we want it to do. The aero map kind of seems pretty happy, it’s just a matter of dialling in the performance now. It’s early days. A bit of a disrupted first session, but we’ll see how we get on tomorrow.”

As for that disrupted first session, he continued: “You look up and down the grid, things go wrong… You’ve got to remember that we’re racing prototypes. We do our best to simulate what the conditions are, but ultimately you come to a track and it’s not quite as you expect.

“In truth, it was a minor issue. We spotted a crack in a part and those tie wraps were added to mitigate that, to stop it getting any worse while we work out what to do properly. We could have left it. It might have been alright if we had left it. We didn’t want to as we’re short of bits.”