Norris “making so many mistakes on Saturday at the minute” after Q3 error

Lando Norris was characteristically self-critical after an error in his final qualifying lap ended his hopes of taking pole position in Abu Dhabi.

The McLaren driver had put together competitive laps up until that point. In Q2 he lapped 0.18 seconds eventual pole-winner Verstappen, and appeared to be in with a chance of taking pole.

Norris told his team on his radio he was “pretty happy” with his Q2 lap. But after doing his first run in Q3 on used tyres, Norris spoiled his subsequent run on new rubber when he skidded over the kerbs between turns 13 and 14.

The error through the hotel section cost Norris a significant amount of time. It left him fifth on the grid, 0.371 seconds off Verstappen’s pole time.

Asked if the mistake would haunt him, Norris said: “I don’t know. If it was for P1, maybe but I don’t think it would’ve been P1. But you never know.

“And, okay, if you just make any mistake in qualifying when you’re fighting for a good position it’s frustrating. But the thing is, I just make so many mistakes on Saturday at the minute.”

He said the error was especially frustrating as qualifying had gone so well up to that point. “Every other lap, in Q1, Q2, were some of my best laps. My first lap in Q3 was very strong.

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“It’s just this one little mistake. I don’t know why it happened, I’ve not done that all weekend. So it’s just frustrating.”

Norris, who tends to be quite strong with his public self-criticism, denied he is unnecessarily hard on himself. “Not at all,” he insisted. “If I’m fighting for P2 and I end up P5 I’m too soft on myself.”

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella, however, doubts Norris’ error cost him pole position. “Based on the GPS data we can see that Verstappen was still ahead of Lando,” said Stella. “So realistically, that could have been close to pole position, but very likely was not sufficient.”

Stella was reluctant to blame his driver for the error. “It’s often difficult to understand what is the driving element compared to – is there an engineering element, is there a characteristic on the car that just makes it so peaky, so unpredictable in some circumstances?”

In their debrief, McLaren has noticed that “recently we have had some driving issues that looked to be more frequent than normal,” said Stella. He said that might be down to “possibly the car losing too much grip, too rapidly, in some conditions.”

“This is a hypothesis,” Stella added. “This is nothing to do with the evidence. But you kind of work by a hypothesis so that you can look into the data, look into the information with a key.

“That’s certainly the key that we will be using in the coming days to look into what are we learning from these situations.”

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