Lando Norris pointed to Ferrari as a bigger threat than Red Bull after his McLaren team roared to the top of the Formula One constructors’ standings for the first time in more than a decade.
Oscar Piastri’s impressive victory and Norris’s fine fourth place with the fastest lap, from 15th on the grid, in Azerbaijan on Sunday catapulted McLaren 20 points clear of faltering champions Red Bull.
Ferrari, who had Carlos Sainz crash out with Red Bull’s Sergio Perez on the penultimate lap while fighting for third, was the second-highest scorer with Charles Leclerc runner-up from pole position.
The Italian team, whose last constructors’ title was in 2008, is third overall and now only 31 points adrift of the reigning champions.
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“Coming into these three races we’ve got now — Monza, here and Singapore — we knew our main contenders would be Ferrari,” said Norris, second overall and now 59 points behind Red Bull’s Max Verstappen with seven races remaining.
“They’ve been our strongest competition lately ... between Carlos and Charles, they’ve been two guys who’ve been performing well and putting us under pressure.”
Leclerc won in Monza, after McLaren had locked out the front row of the grid, and then secured pole position in Baku for the fourth year in a row.
Singapore is next up and Sainz won there last year, with Norris second.
“They are performing well and they seem like our closest competition at the minute. So from a constructors’ point of view, we’re probably more worried about Ferrari than we are about Red Bull,” said the Briton.
McLaren’s return to the top of a championship they last won in 1998 marked another significant milestone in an already surprising season.
Red Bull had led the standings for 55 races, dating back to early 2022.
The transformation from the start of the year, let alone 2023 which already seems another age, has been astonishing and sent statisticians thumbing through the record books for comparisons.
Last year Red Bull won a record 21 of 22 races and McLaren, who last won a constructors' title in 1998, finished fourth and 558 points behind.
Four teams — McLaren, Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes — have now won at least three races each this season, something that last happened in 1977.
There have also been seven different race winners, the most since 2012.
On Sunday rivals from three teams raced nose-to-tail for the lead around the Baku street circuit, slipstreaming and correcting through corners like racers of old.
Yet Red Bull started the season where they left off, with dire predictions of another title parade.
Norris was eighth and 48 seconds behind winner Verstappen in the Bahrain opener. After round five in China, Verstappen had won four and McLaren were 99 points behind Red Bull.
Then Norris won in Miami and, in a year without significant rule changes, the gaps closed.
The last time McLaren was top was after Kevin Magnussen and Jenson Button finished a rogue second and third in the 2014 Australian season-opener in Melbourne, their only podiums of that year.
McLaren scored more points than anyone in 2007 but was stripped after a spying scandal. The team’s sole title of the 21st century remains Lewis Hamilton’s 2008 drivers’ crown.
“The team are giving us a car that can go out and win,” said Norris. “Think back to the first race of the year, we were behind Mercedes. And now we are a long way ahead of them. We have done an amazing job to catch Red Bull. To be outscoring and outpacing them and to be the top team in F1 is something we should be very proud of.” — Reuters
(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2024
