Strong race from Norris and his team. Hopefully this form continues.
If so, they take the WCC surely. The WDC still feels out of reach
McLaren’s only 30 points behind. 9 more races to go. Monza’s next, after which there are two street races at Baku and Singapore which favor Perez so he might put up a good result there.
On the driver side, Norris is 70 points behind. He would have to win every remaining race with the fastest lap to win WDC assuming Verstappen’s behind him on P2, or hope he does lower than that or DNFs a few times.
For the WDC, Piastri will need to get in front of Max more often but not challenge Lando for the win
To be fair, you’d expect team orders to come in for McLaren pretty soon
If Norris wins every remaining race and takes at least 7 out of 9 fastest laps, he wins the WDC even if Max gets second every race.
Max is still the favourite, but it’s close enough that we can maintain a level of tension and excitement for the races at least - one DNF for Max and everything changes.
IMO, Red Bull has reached the end of its development curve, and now McLaren is the quicker car. Better with tires too. Therefore, the WCC is in jeopardy.
The ironic thing is that RB tossed their 2022-2023 car concept and came up with a completely new concept for this year, because they thought that it had more potential for continued developing.
Was that an Adrian Newey decision?
The word I’ve heard is that Newey was against the current direction of the car, and the team going through with it anyway was one of the multiple factors that combined led to him leaving RBR.
