A pole position and the “best lap of his career” were needed to bring a sigh of relief and a smile reminiscent of better days to Lando Norris. The McLaren driver took risks during his lap, and in the end, they paid off, as those few milliseconds earned him the pole. Now the hope is that the setup changes will be effective in the race.
“I think that was the best lap of my career.” It took half an hour for Lando Norris to enjoy the pole position for the United States Grand Prix. For a while now, Lando Norris has set aside his emotions; when he gets out of the car, he remains (at least on the surface) very cool, reaching levels reminiscent of Kimi Raikkonen.
When he entered the press conference room after yesterday’s qualifying session, the British driver flopped onto the couch, and after a deep sigh, the smile from better days finally appeared. “Yeah, it was a nice lap; I think I got everything out of the car. After the sprint race, we changed quite a bit in the setup, and the progress was evident. I didn’t expect to be ahead of everyone.”
As Lando Norris was doing his out lap, which would later become the only run in Q3 of the United States GP, his race engineer, Will Joseph, spoke over the radio. “Lando, don’t push too hard in the ‘snake’ (the high-speed corner sequence from 3 to 9), don’t worry; the time will come anyway.” And the time came, indeed, a great lap that, according to Norris himself, was the best of his career. “Will knows I don’t like team radios like that,” Norris explained, “but after Q2, I told him I wasn’t sure about the car because it was bouncing too much. At that point, he probably realized I lacked a bit of confidence, but don’t let me say it was thanks to Will… because then his ego will grow uncontrollably! Anyway, sometimes a little kick in the backside isn’t a bad thing.”
Lando Norris isn’t lying when he says he was surprised to secure pole position. While the setup changes made by the McLaren engineers went in the right direction, Lando struggled much more than Max Verstappen in the high-speed corners. At Turn 19, he risked losing control of the car, but despite the correction that saved him from going over track limits, the final time was enough to be the best of the day.
“At 19, I knew that if I turned in early, even by a little, I would hit the curb,” he explained. “If I did it too late, I’d go beyond the track limit. But I tried to enter as late as possible; I carried a lot of speed in, and somehow it worked out. For that, I’m sure I couldn’t repeat a lap like that; everything fell into place perfectly.”
Looking ahead to the 56 laps of the race, Norris’s cards remain close to his chest. The sprint race gave a taste of what the Grand Prix could be, but there are no great certainties. The teams have adjusted their setups, and in Lando’s case, it’s not certain that the tire management issues (medium compound) seen in the sprint will resurface. “We’ve improved the car,” the McLaren man emphasized at the end of the qualifying session for the United States Grand Prix in Austin – “That’s for sure. On Friday, we weren’t in the fight for pole; 24 hours later, we secured it, so somehow the situation is better. It will be a race to discover lap by lap; I don’t think we’ll be far from Max in terms of pace, but I repeat, the margins we saw in the sprint were very small, so even the slightest setup improvement could make a difference.” – he concluded.
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