Title hopeful Lando Norris plays down claims that following his teammate's Baku nightmare he failed to take advantage of an open goal.
True, the Briton took 6 points out of what was his teammate's 31-point lead... but four-time world champion Max Verstappen took 25.
Starting from seventh on the grid it was never going to be easy, but, aside from yet another botched pit stop, Norris failed to overhaul Yuki Tsunoda and Liam Lawson.
"I'm doing the best I can in every race," insisted the Briton at race end. "If you look at it like that, every race I finished second or worse this year was an opportunity lost.
"I don't really care how people look at it," he added. "Of course, I needed to do better yesterday but we went out first," he continued, referring to McLaren's strategic error in Q3. "This was our decision and we paid the price for that.
"I also could have ended up in the wall and gone long and something worse happened," he said. "I felt like I was close to maximising today, it didn't maybe look like it from the outside but we struggled with the pace."
Dismissing the pit stop, Norris insists that it is pace that was the factor.
"We weren't too optimistic about our pace today," he said. "Clearly, we struggled a little bit. I don't think the pace is bad, it's just too difficult to overtake.
"I'm doing the best I can. I know I've still got a lot of points to make up against a pretty good driver, an incredible driver. I just need to keep my head down.
"I think on ultimate pace we were still not bad this weekend," he claimed, "I was still quick in FP1, FP2, FP3 and so forth. I think if it was a normal qualifying... the tricky conditions, the water yesterday, the little bit of rain going up first on track, all added up to making it a worse weekend. Our position today, I think if I started second, I think I would have finished second.
"I just don't think we had the pace of Red Bull, honestly," he admitted. "That was very, very clear. I think just the lower-downforce tracks, we still seem to struggle. We still don't have the confidence we need.
"It can be quick, we're just not able to repeat it as often as we need to and as often as the Red Bull, for example.
"We've had an amazing season, don't get me wrong, but we clearly have things that are not good enough and we have to keep working on them."
Of course, Verstappen is always going to be a factor, but clearly Red Bull, especially with its revised floor, has taken a significant step forward.
"It's not often that they're slow," said Norris. "So I think people need to stop being so surprised that they're quick. Max was winning races already at the beginning of the year, he could have won round one, I think he was pretty close to winning round two.
"The whole season they've been quick, the Red Bull has been good, they brought some upgrades to Monza which seems to have helped them improve even more. So, not a surprise, I think we know that they're an incredibly strong team and have one of the best drivers ever in Formula 1, so we expect nothing less.
"They're going to make our life difficult I think for the rest of the season but we also know from our side, we struggled a bit here, Monza clearly we're not quick enough.
"We've made improvements but things where the Red Bull have been so good and dominant in the past, they still have and we don't. Today when I was following the Red Bull, there was clearly some areas where they were just another level to us and we need to understand why," he sighed.
Check out our Sunday gallery from Baku here.
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