Norris still frustrated with 'unfair' Azerbaijan qualifying despite strong race performance

An impressive recovery drive to fourth place in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix was not enough for Lando Norris to shake the feeling that he was unfairly eliminated by a yellow flag in qualifying.  Norris was on his final timed lap of Q1 and set to improve when he came across the slow-moving Esteban Ocon in the final sector – a yellow flag appeared that meant Norris lifted and aborted his lap, despite Ocon having been limping back to the pits with a puncture for some time under a white flag that denotes a slow moving vehicle. While he climbed through from 15th to finish fourth ahead of Max Verstappen on Sunday, Norris says the incident had a huge impact on his scoring potential. “No, it wasn’t fair, you don’t have to be a scientist to work that out,” Norris said. “It’s not for me to decide, it’s not for me to say. It was unfair and for it to ruin my whole weekend… I know I got a fourth and that’s not bad, but it could have been better. Oscar showed what was possible. “It was unfair. There was no yellow the whole lap and they put a yellow out just as I came past. Did I go off the track just before it? Yes. Would I have still easily got into the top 15? Yes. I know there’s a lot of people that thought it would have ruined my lap, but even with my off track, I only lost a couple of tenths and I still would have easily been in. “People can say what they want and I find a lot of it funny but this was out of my control and it was something that was unfair. It cost me a good amount of points in the championship and kind of ruined my weekend. So it’s disappointing, especially because of how good the car was. I’m a guy that was thinking of what could have been, not how we did necessarily. But I am very happy with performance.” Although he was frustrated by the qualifying result, Norris admits beating Verstappen had not been a realistic target pre-race, with the team predicting eighth place to be the likely outcome. “A little bit surprised, because when you start 15th you don’t expect to beat him. They all boxed and we were behind them, so I was about 22 seconds behind on real terms to where they were. So to create a gap ahead of him and then to box and still overtake him, I wasn’t expecting to do such a thing. “But I could defend against Max because he spent six laps trying to catch up, a few laps behind when the Ferrari was behind, and I knew his tires were getting a bit hot so he couldn’t attack me anymore. So I played the game well and I knew I couldn’t defend against Carlos , but I could defend against Max. “But the main point was I defended against Checo and allowed him not to get ahead of Oscar, which allowed us to go and get the win. So I did my small part for the team, which I am very happy for because it got us to P1 in the constructors’, so that’s probably the thing that makes me the happiest.”