Lando Norris dismissed suggestions he should have taken greater advantage of a chance to narrow the gap to his title rival Oscar Piastri after the Australian crashed out of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, with the British driver insisting he did not care how his performance was evaluated.
The race was won by Red Bull’s Max Verstappen but behind him Piastri crashed on the opening lap. Norris, who trailed his McLaren teammate by 31 points going into the meeting, started in seventh but only finished in the same position, taking just six points from Piastri.
Norris rubbished accusations that he had missed his chance to put a major points swing on his competitor. “I’m doing the best I can in every race,” he said. “Every race I finished second or worse this year was an opportunity lost. I don’t really care how people look at it.”
He suffered with a poor qualifying, within a scruffy lap including brushing the wall and his team putting him out too early with the track grip still evolving, and maintained that with overtaking hard in Baku, his race chances had been scuppered on Saturday.
“Of course I wanted more, so it was not a good result,” he added. “I couldn’t do anything more. It was lost yesterday. It’s just impossible to overtake. So I look back to yesterday more than anything today.”
During the race Norris became embroiled in a series of DRS trains from which he could not escape, compounded by a slow pit stop from McLaren – the team’s second for Norris in two races – without which he might have made up at least two more places. He felt he had exacted all he could in difficult circumstances.
“I could have ended up in the wall and gone long and something worse happened. I felt like I was close to maximising today,” he said. “It didn’t maybe look like it from the outside but we struggled with the pace. It’s just too difficult to overtake.
“I’m doing the best I can. I know I’ve still got a lot of points to make up against a pretty good driver, an incredible driver. I just need to keep my head down.”
Mercedes’ George Russell also admitted he was happy just to get the race over with, after he claimed an impressive second place despite suffering with an illness all weekend.
“I was pretty glad when I saw the chequered flag, to be honest,” he said. “I was fortunate, I felt much better today than I felt on Friday and Saturday. Fortunately, it was Baku. Even though it’s one of the toughest circuits, mentally and physically it’s maybe one of the easiest.”
The Mercedes team principal, Toto Wolff, said the team had been considering replacing Russell with reserve driver Valtteri Bottas earlier in the weekend and praised the British driver for sticking at his task.
“On Friday, it was touch and go,” Wolff said. “In the morning, he himself said: ‘I’m not sure I can make it’. Then somehow he recovered but overnight it got worse, every single day. So I think it was a big push for him to even drive, and then to perform like this is mega.
“Doing a one-and-a-half hour race here in Baku, not putting a single foot wrong. That was a super-merited P2.”