Norris says McLaren is 1.5 seconds off Mercedes in Baku

Lando Norris said McLaren was about 1.5 seconds off the pace after Thursday practice for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in Baku, describing the deficit to Mercedes as “a knife in the heart” and saying he did not know how much the team could recover before qualifying. George Russell topped both practice sessions, according to reports on Thursday’s running. Norris was sixth in the second session, with teammate Oscar Piastri eighth. Norris said McLaren was “miles off” and called the car’s pace “pretty pants,” while noting that it had not felt particularly bad to drive. Asked whether McLaren could close the gap, Norris said he hoped the team could make progress but could not estimate how much. He said the team would work on the car overnight. His assessment centered on speed rather than confidence: he said he cared about the car’s pace, not how confident he felt driving it, and that McLaren was not very fast at the moment. The reported deficit was not expressed identically across the accounts of the practice sessions. One described Norris as 1.484 seconds behind the benchmark in FP2; another characterized McLaren as averaging about 1.5 seconds off Russell’s times across FP1 and FP2.