The championship lead isn’t bringing the right serenity to a fragile Lando Norris: during Q3 in Jeddah, the British driver threw away a golden opportunity, becoming the protagonist of a serious crash with his McLaren on his first flying attempt.
Just moments after the start of the final segment of Saudi qualifying, the marshals wave the red flag to the drivers. The cameras focus on the rear of a crashed car in Sector 1. It’s Lando Norris’s McLaren: the Briton’s crash is a real twist, coming at a rather delicate time for the 1999-born driver.
The media pressure, which has increased in recent weeks, proved fatal for Lando Norris in Q3 at Jeddah. On his first timed lap, Lando put his papaya into the wall, undoing all the team’s efforts.
But what happened to Lando Norris? What caused that crash in Q3?
“It had been a very solid weekend up to that point. In Q3, when Lando tried to push the car to find those extra thousandths, the car no longer responded the way he expected.”
That’s how Andrea Stella, McLaren’s team principal, analysed the qualifying incident, though he reserved final judgment pending further analysis: “I think we’ll see this factor more clearly from the data once we properly review the situation. In some way, the behaviour surprised Lando,” the Italian engineer explained.
Was Lando Norris’s mistake a reflection of a McLaren problem?
Is this a sudden wake-up call for the papaya team? Andrea Stella, in fact, appeared fairly calm about it: “In a way, it’s an isolated episode. What happened is just that—an episode—and I think it stems from some work we’ve done on the car. This work has made the car faster, but I think it has also made the McLaren more unpredictable for Lando.”
While pushing to find the car’s limits, Lando Norris also fell into error due to a McLaren that’s hard to anticipate: “The transition from having grip to losing it is quite abrupt. The feedback drivers get from the car is rather unresponsive. The car doesn’t provide much warning and drivers can only guess how it will behave. On this front, we’re struggling a bit as a team.” – he concluded at the end of the qualifying session for the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.
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