In the high-speed, high-stakes world of Formula 1, there are weekends that pass by quietly, and then there are weekends that sear themselves into the mind, forcing drivers to question everything they believe in. For McLaren, the Baku Grand Prix wasn’t just a bad weekend; it was a perfect storm that exposed latent cracks, turning golden opportunities into a tangled mess of frustration and regret. The sun had barely risen over the streets of Baku when the storm began to brew, not in the skies, but right inside the McLaren garage. When the dust finally settled, both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri were left staring at the wreckage of a weekend that could have changed the championship but didn’t.

Piastri’s Horrific Start: Bad Luck or Personal Error?

For Oscar Piastri, it all fell apart on the very first lap, at turn four. A slow start, a botched launch, and then a disastrous lock-up. Race over. No points. His streak of 34 consecutive points finishes vanished in the blink of an eye. “For me, if I felt like I was in a completely different headspace, then it’s kind of easier to blame it on that,” Piastri admitted afterward. “But this weekend’s felt like any other weekend, just unfortunately, there’s been far too many mistakes from start to finish.”

Piastri’s words echoed with profound self-criticism, an acknowledgment that not everything was beyond his control. From power unit issues in the first free practice (FP1) to scraping the wall in FP2, from a third-place practice finish to a costly crash in qualifying, everything went wrong. But the ultimate blow came in the race itself. A mistake on lap one, something that shouldn’t happen at this level, but it did. And while Piastri was left nursing a bruised ego in the garage, Lando Norris was handed a “golden ticket,” a wide-open chance to carve into the 31-point deficit to his teammate with just seven races left.

Norris’s Squandered Opportunity: Six Painful Points

So, how many points did Lando Norris walk away with? A mere six, six painful and forgettable points. “I’m doing the best I can in every race,” Lando said, deflecting the idea that he missed a major opportunity. “If you look at that, every race I finished second or worse this year was an opportunity lost. I don’t really care how people look at it.” But you could tell he did care. Because behind those words was a driver who knows what this weekend was supposed to be. A weekend where he topped FP1, then again in FP3. A weekend that screamed potential until qualifying sent it spiraling into a dead end.

McLaren made a strategic blunder by sending Norris out early in Q3, before the track conditions peaked. The decision backfired. The rain, the red flags, the gamble—it all went wrong. “Of course, I needed to do better yesterday, but we went out first, this was just our decision, and we paid the price for that,” he admitted. “I could have done that, I also could have ended up in the wall.”

And then came the race. A lifeless trudge through traffic, seventh on the grid and seventh at the flag, stuck behind slower cars, unable to attack. It’s the kind of race that looks invisible on paper but eats away at a driver from the inside. Why? Because McLaren’s pit stop, once again, ruined it all.

The Pit Stop Catastrophe: 4.1 Seconds of Fate

Lap 38, Lando dived into the pits. It should have been a clean stop, one that brought him out into clear air, free of the slower Racing Bulls and Ferraris. But instead, the front right wheel nut jammed. 4.1 seconds. A blink in time, but in Formula 1, that blink cost him everything.

“He would have cleared that whole pack of cars,” Karun Chandhok cried on Sky Sports. “Massively frustrating for Lando Norris and McLaren.” Instead of rejoining in P5, Norris slotted in behind Liam Lawson, behind Charles Leclerc, behind Yuki Tsunoda—a full-on DRS train, and he had no way out. Bernie Collins did the math: “Should have come out ahead of Leclerc and Tsunoda, even without any other overtakes, he should have been P5 without that slow pit stop.”

Even McLaren boss Andrea Stella admitted the team might have failed Lando more than the other way around. “If anything, the responsibility to try and extract more points may lay more on the team’s side,” he said. “With a fast pit stop, we could have given Lando the opportunity perhaps to attack Lawson, instead of just defending, just surviving.” “I don’t think we were bad,” Norris said, “but I could barely keep up with Tsunoda. There were parts of the track where the Red Bull was just unbelievably fast. Had no chance to keep up.”

A Car on a “Knife’s Edge” and Internal Tensions

The car, he said, felt like it was on a “knife’s edge”—too twitchy, too fragile. One wrong move and it was gone. So instead of charging forward, Lando spent his race staring at rear wings and brake lights, lap after lap, knowing full well he had a car fast enough for more but was boxed in, held back, and let down.

And if you think that was the worst of it, just wait, because the real damage wasn’t done on track; it was done in the garage. Inside McLaren, tensions simmered, quiet but heavy, like smoke after a fire. On paper, it’s just a seventh-place finish, just a bad pit stop, just a difficult weekend. But look closer, hear the tone in Lando’s voice, watch the way he shrugs off suggestions that he blew a golden chance to close the gap to Oscar Piastri. “I don’t really care how people look at it,” he said, but that’s the thing. He does. Because he knows what this could have been, and he knows what it wasn’t.

A weekend that started with Norris topping the time sheets in practice turned into a strategic blunder in qualifying, followed by a disastrous pit stop that locked him behind slower cars and an invisible race where he was left helpless. And worst of all, this wasn’t new. “It’s also the second race in a row they have had a slow pit stop,” Bernie Collins pointed out. “That’s something they need to get on top of.” Lando didn’t say it outright, but the frustration seeped through. McLaren is a team that’s grown used to fighting at the front again, but when the pit crew fumbles, when strategy fails, when the execution breaks down not once but twice, it’s no longer just bad luck; it’s a pattern.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the garage, Oscar Piastri stood in the shadows of his own disappointment. His DNF wasn’t about bad luck or bad pit calls; it was about mistakes, too many of them. “Every single session has been messy,” Piastri said. “So yeah, just trying to clean that up is the important thing for the future.”

The Championship Fight and Big Questions for McLaren

But here’s the twist: even with that crash, even with the chaos, Piastri still walked away leading the championship. He’s 25 points clear of Norris. And while Verstappen looms in the distance, 69 points back and gaining momentum, the two McLaren drivers now have a new problem: each other. Lando had a golden opportunity to strike while Oscar was down. Instead, a measly six points, a blown chance. And for a team pushing to dethrone Red Bull, internal cracks like these can’t be ignored.

Andrea Stella tried to ease the pressure. “I think Lando had a strong race,” he said. “He raced to the limit of the potential that was available in the car. No other driver in Lando’s car could have scored more.” But that only tells part of the story. Because Lando wasn’t in clean air. He wasn’t given track position, and he wasn’t allowed to show what the car might have done if McLaren hadn’t miscalculated again. “If I started second, I think I would have finished second,” Norris insisted. “But clearly, we struggled a bit, the lower downforce tracks we still seem to struggle.”

And that’s the final sting. This wasn’t just a one-off. This wasn’t just Baku. Monza wasn’t fast enough, Baku was a mess. Even with improvements, the team still can’t touch Red Bull where it matters most—not in execution, not in consistency, and definitely not when the pressure is on. “We’ve had an amazing season, don’t get me wrong,” Norris added, “but we clearly have things that are not good enough, and we have to keep working on them.”

So now what? The title fight is still alive, but barely. Norris must now claw back a 25-point gap with only seven races to go. Piastri, despite his chaotic weekend, is still the one in control. And as for Verstappen, he’s circling, patient, waiting. It’s not just about car upgrades anymore, not about pure speed. It’s about resilience, about pressure, about which of McLaren’s golden boys blinks first. And somewhere deep inside that papaya garage, one question will not go away: how many more mistakes can McLaren afford before their entire season slips away?

Now it’s your turn. Was this just a one-off disaster for Norris and McLaren, or are we starting to see the cracks in a team that can’t handle the heat? Let us know what you think in the comments, because this fight, it’s only just getting started.