F1 | Norris victim of a yellow flag that could have been avoided

Lando Norris’s small and concrete hopes for the world championship are in danger of vanishing due to a yellow flag. The McLaren driver will start the Azerbaijan Grand Prix from seventeenth position, certainly not ideal for those who had arrived in Baku with the aim of nibbling away at Max Verstappen’s world championship points. Norris has nothing to reproach himself for, the perfect storm that prevented him from making the cut in Q1 hit the person who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, namely Lando.

After the first run of Q1, Norris looked comfortable, in the top 10 ahead of Verstappen. After the usual pit stop, everyone (apart from Leclerc and Perez) returned to the track for the final five minutes, a phase in which McLaren waited until the last moment to send its cars out, but this is a habit, especially in Q1 and Q2. While Norris and Piastri were on their launch lap, Ocon slowed on the straight between turns 3 and 4 due to a power unit issue. Esteban asked the team whether he should pull over to the side of the track or take an escape route. “I was told to go back to the pits,” Ocon explained, and indeed he continued at a slow pace for the rest of the lap.

At this point the FIA ​​reported the presence on the track of a single-seater that was proceeding slowly, displaying (after an initial yellow light when Ocon slowed down) a series of white flags that followed Ocon along his path. When Esteban was right at turn 14, to stay off the racing line he cut the chicane, as is usual, but on the electronic boards preceding that point instead of the white flag a yellow one appeared.

Norris, who in the meantime had launched himself for his fastest lap improving his first two sectors, was the only driver to pass through that point under yellow flag, and so he aborted the lap. The insult for Lando was a great improvement in the grip of the asphalt, a variable that allowed all the drivers on the track to lower the times of the first ‘run’, thus finding himself excluded.

“I felt good,” Norris explained, “but if everyone does a second flying lap and I don’t, there’s not much you can do. I was just unlucky, that’s all, Ocon was on the left side of the track and the yellow flag came out, I had to lift my foot off the accelerator, I couldn’t do anything else. Obviously I’m disappointed and frustrated, but I can’t do anything about it, that’s how it went.” Andrea Stella also didn’t hide his disappointment, especially for the FIA’s actions.

“We didn’t even have time to warn Lando about the yellow flag because it appeared just before he passed,” explained the McLaren team principal. “We were in contact with the FIA ​​because the yellow flag is not necessary when there is a car that is proceeding slowly and off-trajectory, the situation we saw today according to the regulations should not have happened, and we paid the price for it.”

After answering the first questions with his head down and in a small voice, Lando perked up a bit when asked what he can realistically aim for in the race. “What will I do tomorrow? Frankly, I don’t know, I have a lot of tyres available, I still hope to be able to get a good result because the car is going well, it’s very high-performance, but to hope for a good comeback, strategy will be fundamental. If the DRS train forms, you can’t overtake, so I hope to be able to race in clean air”.