Lando Norris says that the low grip nature of the Las Vegas circuit doesn’t suit the McLaren MCL38 – and suggests that his qualifying performance showed how hard it is “to get everything out” of the car.
McLaren has had a string of pole positions this season, but in Las Vegas Norris could qualify only sixth, while his team mate Oscar Piastri was eighth.
Mercedes, Ferrari, Alpine and Red Bull each have at least one car ahead of Norris on the grid.
Asked by this writer about the surprise of the team only having the fifth fastest car in Q3 Norris joked about how rivals have talked up the Woking team this year.
“It’s incredible, especially because we have the fastest car by a mile, right?,” he said. “Yeah, weird. Maybe it’s the water in the tyres or something. All of this stuff, they’re right about everything!
“It’s just it’s very low grip, it just doesn’t suit us, doesn’t suit our characteristic of car. We have to drive the car on the perfect limit if we want to be quick. It takes a lot, I think, to get everything out of our car normally. When we do, we can be quick.
“Here it’s just too difficult to get everything out of the car. Every lap there’s another issue or a different issue, and it was just too much of a challenge. It’s been a challenge the last two days, nothing’s changed from yesterday.
“It’s just that others have turned up and gone lower fuel and things like that. Maybe it wasn’t our best Q3.
“I made a couple of small mistakes, but mistakes which were just very difficult to avoid, and it was just too difficult to put a clean lap in, because I’m trying to go quicker.
“But at the same time, I’m trying to not make any mistake. And a mistake around here can easily be one-tenth, two-tenths gone. So just too much of a challenge for us out there.”
Norris admitted that it wasn’t easy to find the right qualifying strategy at a track where it is hard to warm up the tyres.
“We were doing different stuff to what everyone else was doing. I have been all weekend happy with doing out-push. For Q3 we tried something else, and maybe it was not the best. I did the warmup-push, and no magic came our way.
“I don’t think there was maybe a correct one, but I think that wasn’t our issue today. It was more just our car balance and how we have to drive our car, it makes it too difficult.
“That’s our issue. It’s not tyres. It’s not because they’re too hot or too cold or all of this nonsense, or the water. It’s just our car doesn’t see these conditions.”
Regarding Saturday’s race he said: “It could be that we tomorrow, we put on the hard tyre, and things come our way a little bit. Every race this year, we struggled with graining. We’ve not been good on the softer tyres.
“That’s the same now, but it’s almost the case in a in a quali lap, you almost start to grain the tyres already. And we struggle a lot in these kinds of conditions.
“So I’m hoping when you put a medium on a little bit, I mean, they still grain very easily, but when you put the hard on, hopefully things click a little bit.
“It’s just our weaknesses on how the car is with the front tyres. It’s been an issue for a while. We’ve not been able to tackle it as much as what I would have liked at this point. And we’re paying the price for that kind of thing.”
Norris downplayed his battle with World Championship leader Max Verstappen, who has a good chance of securing the title in Saturday’s race.
“Whether he wins or not tomorrow, for me is not going to change anything,” he said. “He’s pretty likely to win the championship. But I’m here to race and do my best in every single race I can, whether Max finishes ahead or not, that’s life.
“He’s only just ahead of us today. I think we have a chance to beat them tomorrow, but I’ll go out and do my best, like I do in every single race. And whatever the outcome is, the outcome is.”
Adam Cooper F1 