Lando Norris has revealed the unusual new qualifying approach he has been using that helped him to claim pole position at the Formula 1 Mexico City Grand Prix.
Exuding confidence from his first laps on Friday, Norris held a significant advantage at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, showing strong long-run pace in practice.
A half-second advantage over Piastri through Q1 and Q2 increased to an eight-tenths gulf in Q3, the Australian set to start Sunday’s race from a disappointing seventh.
However, Norris remained blissfully unaware of his dominance in Q3, his engineer Will Joseph radioing his driver to confirm his pole position and the size of his advantage.
Norris confirmed the strategy was deliberate, though, part of a new approach to qualifying that avoids fixation on delta times, preventing potentially costly mistakes.
“Quite often the laps that I don’t really know what’s happened, or how it’s happened, are the laps I do the best”, he told media including Motorsport Week.
“Like I said on the radio to Will and Jarv [Andrew Jarvis, performance engineer] – the less I know, the better I do normally on my quali laps. So it was one of them.”
“I’ve not had it since Monaco, and I’ve never used the delta since in qualifying,” Norris explained. “Who knows if it would have helped me or made me worse.
“I think the thing when I don’t have it is I push no matter what – no matter how the start of the lap was, no matter how any corner was.
“I guess it’s because you have no reference of maybe the overall lap time, you just always try and maximise every corner to the maximum.
“Otherwise, sometimes I just stare at it too much, and that’s never the best thing.
“It’s just nice because normally when it goes well, like today, it’s a pleasant surprise to see the lap time pop up when it’s as good as this one.”
How did Norris find six-tenths of a second?
His final lap in Q3 saw Norris find a six-tenths of a second to usurp Charles Leclerc to take away pole position, an achievement that he does not fully understand.
“That’s the confusing thing,” he admitted. “I mean, it was obviously an incredible lap. I pushed the braking everywhere. I pushed the high speed a bit more, and all those things.
“But I don’t have a delta, so I don’t know if I was up, if I was down, if it was good, bad, whatever.
“There were a couple little places where I thought I messed up a touch and didn’t get the best exits, like out of Turn 6, but the rest of it felt pretty decent.”
Norris expressed that he found a happy place with the balance of his McLaren that allowed him to find the sort of confidence that he had in the car back in Monaco.
“It was one of those laps where everything just came together in terms of feeling,” Norris said. “It was very natural, and similar to my lap in Monaco.
“So a good feeling because it’s been a while. It’s not that often this year I get that feeling in this car, even with how quick it is.”
READ MORE – Why Lando Norris was puzzled by his ‘similar to Monaco’ F1 pole position lap in Mexico
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