Despite clinching his second successive front-row start of the Formula 1 Austrian Grand Prix weekend, Lando Norris adjudges that McLaren’s pace was simply “not enough” to challenge polesitter Max Verstappen.
Norris was less than a tenth shy of Verstappen during Friday’s Sprint qualifying and challenged him for victory early on during Saturday morning’s Sprint, but the Red Bull ace turned up the pace in GP qualifying.
With qualifying results often being decided by minor fractions of a second, Verstappen out-qualifying Norris by over four-tenths on a 64 second lap is seismic in comparison.
Norris insinuated his laps on Saturday were missing something compared to the day prior as he sought to reason why his McLaren was a step behind Verstappen’s charging bull.
“[It was] a bit trickier today than it was yesterday for, you know, wind and kind of conditions and stuff like that,” Norris said.
“But, you know, relatively, we’re much further back, closer to the Mercedes and Ferraris than we were relative to Max.
“So a bit of it’s in my lap. Like definitely yesterday, I probably did a better lap and made up for some of it and I think today there was at least one or two-tenths in just doing a very good lap from my side, but definitely not enough to get Max.
“So he did a good job and Red Bull made a good step from where they were yesterday and clearly were a lot quicker than what we could achieve today.
“So still P2, still front row and yeah, hopefully we can turn that into something good tomorrow.”
Saturday morning’s Sprint provided Norris with a trial run at challenging Verstappen for a race victory, but he came up short.
A lunge into Turn 3 on Lap 5 granted him a temporary lead, before leaving the door open lost him first back to Verstappen and third to his McLaren team-mate Oscar Piastri.
However, that slip-up aside, Norris is unsure if he’d have had the pace in racing conditions to challenge Verstappen to the chequered flag and predicts another difficult challenger for Sunday’s Grand Prix given the Dutchman’s pace in qualifying.
“I know what I did wrong,” Norris said of the Sprint.
“It was obviously very clear. But from the pace advantage Max had today, that’s probably going to carry into something tomorrow as well.
“So I’m not sure even today if I, you know, had a perfect run of things and if it was just between Max and myself, I’m not sure I probably would have had the pace to quite keep up with what Max was able to do.
“Then into quali today, it showed that they were just a pretty good step ahead of us. So we’ll see.”
Norris wasn’t all glass half empty however, saying “It’s another day. Things can change and conditions are going to be very warm again. So the races have been good to us lately.
“It’s been one of our strengths relative to qualifying. So [I’m] excited to see what we can do.”
