What’s behind Norris’ top-speed issue in Baku – and why McLaren itself is down on Mercedes

A technical problem caused a lack of top speed on Lando Norris’ McLaren Formula 1 car in Azerbaijan Grand Prix qualifying, with the reigning world champion down in fifth.

Despite having outqualified team-mate Oscar Piastri 9-1 in the 10 previous sessions, Norris found himself three tenths’ adrift in Q3 – his worst deficit of the season. A lock-up in Q3 didn’t help, but as it happens, the McLaren driver was hindered by an issue on his MCL40.

“There's more in my car for some reason than the other car,” Norris said of his top speed deficit, addressing the media right after the session. “So we have to understand why I'm basically having to push more than Oscar to try and make up for my straightline speed.”

The Briton’s top speed was 3.4km/h down on Piastri’s in qualifying, but McLaren already has clues as to where the problem originated.

“On Lando's side specifically, we observe a deficit of power that we are investigating,” team principal Andrea Stella explains. “It seems to be linked to some behaviour of the fuel injection, something that hopefully we, or the adaptive systems, should be able to improve for tomorrow.

“It looks that occasionally the power unit generates a bit less power, but this is a specific phenomenon, a specific issue. It has nothing to do with the overall behaviour of the power unit.”

Lando Norris, McLaren

Photo by: Steven Tee / LAT Images via Getty Images

This occurred in the wider context of McLaren suffering from a much more substantial lack of straightline speed relative to its own power unit provider, Mercedes. George Russell was 8.1km/h quicker than Piastri and 11.5km/h faster than Norris in Baku.

Asked if this was down to power unit exploitation or a draggy McLaren, Norris said: “It's both. They have a very efficient car, they always have done for years. We need to take a big step in that direction if we want to be competitive in any straightline-speed track for the rest of the season.”

Stella mostly concurred and insisted this was a mere case of McLaren needing to match Mercedes’ level across all areas.

“In a circuit like this, we have seen in every practice session and then in qualifying that we were losing time in the straight compared to Mercedes,” the Italian pondered.

“While we have the same power unit, there's a few differences, and I think it's fair to say that their package, chassis, ratios, power unit itself, it just seems to be more effective when it comes to generating top speed. We saw how strong they were in Monza, pretty much in every long straight in the championship they were able to generate more speed.

“It would be incorrect from an engineering point of view to say that there's a difference in power unit or they use the power unit a little bit better, because in fact we don't know and we are not assuming that there's any difference.

“It’s the package that is more effective for them, like they might have even less aerodynamic drag; we know that drag is an area that we need to keep working on. As a fact, we think it's an opportunity to do better.”