Lando Norris has conceded that he was unable to contest pole position at Formula 1‘s Mexico City Grand Prix as his McLaren car became “too difficult to drive” in Q3.
Norris went into the pole position shootout at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez having managed to post the benchmark laps in the two earlier qualifying sessions.
However, the Briton was unable to maintain that advantage in the final stage as he dropped to third place behind Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz and Red Bull’s Max Verstappen.
Despite appearing the leading candidate to take top spot earlier in proceedings, Norris has denied that McLaren had the pace to make up the three-tenth gap to Sainz.
Asked how good his final run was, Norris told media including Motorsport Week: “Not good enough, clearly. Honestly, I’m relatively happy-ish. Still P3.
“Not a great day, yes. I mean, I missed FP1 and then with the alternate tyres [in FP2].
“So I felt like a bit on the back foot. Not as much as what Max was. But not been that comfortable at all.
“Found some good steps into qualifying, and Q1 and Q2 were very good. But I mean, I found the limit very quickly.
“I was happy to find the limit. And things were good, but just couldn’t progress from there.
“The car was too difficult to drive in Q3. Too difficult to get, especially three-tenths out of it, compared to Carlos.
“So happy with it. For a minute, it looked like it could have been better. But I think we finished where we should be.”
McLaren peaked before F1 rivals in Mexico
Norris has claimed that his regression down the order come Q3 derived from him extracting the peak potential from his package earlier than his nearest competitors.
“I was at the limit,” he reiterated. “I couldn’t go any quicker. It’s more I think the others just didn’t get the most out of it.
“Yeah, pretty much every corner I was close to locking up and making mistakes. And I did that in my Q3 run one lap.
“But I had definitely nowhere near close to three-tenths left in the car. So it was more that they just went quicker.
“I was at the limit. I got everything out of the car already in Q1 and Q2, [it] made us look like the ones to beat.
“But honestly, Ferrari have been the ones to beat, and Carlos is top today, so challenging to beat them tomorrow.”
Norris not expecting to rival Ferrari
With Ferrari having dominated the race in the United States last weekend, Norris is not anticipating McLaren to boast the raw pace to be in position to challenge Sainz.
“I mean, the race pace is always a tough one to know,” he assessed. “The last few weekends, they’ve [Ferrari] been extremely quick and quicker than us.
“So I don’t have the confidence to say, yes, we can just beat them on pace. Like today, not on their level.
“But tomorrow’s another day. If we can have a good start, hopefully it’s exciting down to Turn 1.
“Yeah, Carlos is going to be fast. Like he said, he’s got nothing to lose.
“And they’ve been fastest for the last few weekends. So we’ll try our best. But I don’t think we have the pace compared to them at the moment.”
READ MORE – Lando Norris issues downbeat verdict on McLaren’s Mexico F1 update
