“I’m bloody shit. What the hell am I doing?” Lando Norris said angrily on the radio after his final Q3 lap in qualifying for the Qatar Grand Prix. Because the McLaren driver already knew that the race management would cancel his lap time.
Norris had already lost his first lap time in Q3 because he exceeded the track limits. His second lap, like the first, would have been good enough for P2 behind Max Verstappen. But this too was canceled again, as Norris feared.
“I’m just so stupid,” Norris radioed again shortly afterwards and added: “I’m sorry, that’s on me. Good job, the car was good. I just didn’t do my job well enough.” Even when he gets out of the car, his mood hasn’t improved.
“Shit,” he replies when asked how he feels. “I just had to correct the oversteer and went off the track,” he explains his mistake and makes it clear once again: “The team did a good job. I just messed it up.”
When asked that it was still a long weekend with the sprint on Saturday, Norris emphasized: “I don’t think like that. I just think about the job that I should have done today.” It was about delivering “good laps” without mistakes. And he couldn’t do that.
Formula 1: Teammate Oscar Piastri also unlucky
It was therefore “not a good day for me,” he emphasizes. Because he ultimately didn’t set a valid lap time in Q3, he will only start the main race on Sunday from tenth place on the grid. Meanwhile, teammate Oscar Piastri was also unlucky.
The rookie qualified fourth and would actually have moved up to P3 because Norris wasn’t allowed to keep his lap times. But Piastri’s second Q3 lap was also subsequently canceled because he had also exceeded the track limits.
“Wonderful,” explains Piastri sarcastically when, in the middle of his TV interview after qualifying, he finds out that he has dropped from P3 to P6. In any case, he was “not particularly happy with myself” because it was a “very, very sloppy last round”.
“We have another qualifying session and the sprint race tomorrow. Hopefully we can […] Do a little better tomorrow in qualifying and have a good Saturday,” hopes Piastri, who finds it “of course a shame” not to start from the second row on Sunday.
“But the car felt good. I just pushed a little too hard on the last lap,” he explains, emphasizing that points are “definitely” still possible. He explains: “I think it’s very narrow and it’s easy to make mistakes, the track is very slippery.”
“That doesn’t make things easy for us. But we’ll try again,” he emphasizes, and Andrea Stella even dreams of finishing on the podium from sixth and tenth on the grid on Sunday. The McLaren team boss reveals this in an interview with “Sky”.
Formula 1: McLaren hopes for a podium finish
“It’s a long weekend ahead of us and we don’t just want to limit the damage, we want to completely regain the position and get back to where we belong,” he clarifies. And that would have been P2 in qualifying if Norris had been allowed to keep at least one lap time.
“It’s obviously a bit disappointing because the result doesn’t reflect the car’s potential,” emphasizes Stella, explaining that the performance was actually “quite strong” and therefore “encouraging” for the rest of the weekend.
“That’s a difficult result to accept, but at the same time the weekend is pretty long,” he clarifies and reminds that in theory both of Norris’ Q3 laps would have been enough for P2, even though it was “not a clean lap at all.” has been.
The “potential” of the MCL60 is undoubtedly present in Qatar. “It looks like we are the second force with this type of track layout at the moment,” said Stella, because Qatar is similar to the track in Suzuka, where McLaren recently finished second and third.
Friday was “unfortunate,” but there are still “many opportunities” to move forward. So you still have the sprint and the race itself, which will be “interesting from a tire perspective,” says Stella, who still dreams of a place on the podium.
However, both drivers would have to make fewer mistakes than in qualifying.