Immediately after qualifying on Saturday at the Spanish Grand Prix Lando Norris stated that it took a “perfect lap” to beat Max Verstappen. Norris pipped the Red Bull driver by two-hundredths of a second to capture the second pole position of his career, putting him in position to score his second victory of the season.
Moments later at the FIA Press Conference, the McLaren driver went even further, outlining how his final lap needed to be “balls out” to beat Verstappen.
“I mean, we’re always close. I don’t think any practice was split by more than a tenth between the top five,” described Norris. “So I was expecting the same as that, and I think it was. Probably Max was always two and a half tenths ahead of everyone, both Q1 and Q2 in the runs we did. And we did three laps, you know, we did three runs, four runs in the end altogether. So you do four laps throughout the whole of qualifying. But every time was like missing a little bit to Max and a lot of it was high speed.
“So I knew for the final lap, I’ve got to go balls out and do it, you know. And I managed to get that little bit, like that, you know, 200ths, 300ths, 400ths that I was needing to get out of Max I managed to get. So I’m happy the risks paid off and for all of it to come together when I needed it most was great.”
Norris elaborated on how good it felt to put together that kind of lap, in that moment and on that stage.
“I mean, I’m probably going to get back and Jarv [Andrew Jarvis], my engineer, is going to tell me that I’ve messed something up, but I think it’s so tricky nowadays, with the car and the [tires], and we’re pushing so much, just to put everything together,” outlined Norris. “You might be able to do half of it once and half of it another or mix it up, but to kind of put all of it right at that limit is very tricky and I’m sure every driver would say the same. So very rewarding when you do and when you do it and end up on pole because of it, it’s even sweeter.”
“It feels great, yeah. I mean, poles always feel good, and it’s the second one in my career. I mean, I’ve had two Sprint race poles, but I don’t regard that at all as a pole position. So, yeah, this is the second one of my career. It’s been a while since Sochi, all the way back then, so… Yeah, it feels great,” continued Norris. “I mean, it was an amazing lap.
“Honestly, it was my best lap by a long way. I pretty much put the whole lap together, so I got a nice slipstream. I think probably my best corner around the lap, every single part of it put together. Max was a bit ahead in Q1, Q2. I knew I had to kind of do something perfect in Q3 to do it. And that’s exactly what I did. So I’m pretty happy that I managed to pull off probably my best lap that I’ve done probably ever.”
As we outlined earlier today after diving into the data, Norris secured pole position with a strong performance in Sector 1 and into Sector 2. While Verstappen was stronger on the straights, particularly the long straight coming out of Turn 14 and back to the start/finish line, Norris built a lead during that earlier portion of the track, and Verstappen could not make up the difference.
Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images
Capturing pole position is one thing, but can Norris win on Sunday?
The McLaren driver certainly believes he can.
“I don’t have any concerns,” added Norris. “I mean I’m excited. It’s a long run down to Turn 1. It’s probably one of the places you don’t want to start on pole, but it’s an opportunity for us to go out and try and win a race you know.
“We’ve not done loads of long running. We’ve done a bit and I think we were close, as it always has been. I think tomorrow is not like this car is way quicker. I think between Mercedes, ourselves, Red Bull, Ferrari, there’s eight cars that could have probably been on pole today and that have a chance of probably winning the race tomorrow,” continued Norris. “So it’s about making the least mistakes, similar to today, and just trying to execute another good race that we normally do.”
He might need to go “balls out” yet again to pull off a win on Sunday.