Lando Norris delighted after beating Max Verstappen to US Grand Prix pole

AUSTIN – Lando Norris oozed satisfaction on Oct 19 after beating series leader and three-time world champion Max Verstappen to pole position for the United States Grand Prix on Oct 20.

The McLaren driver clocked a best lap of 1min 32.330sec to outpace by by 0.031sec his Red Bull rival, who leads the title race by 54 points with six races remaining.

On the second row were Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc.

“It was a beautiful lap,” said Norris, after claiming his first American pole and his fourth pole in five races as he seeks to overhaul Verstappen.

“I was not going to go much quicker than I did. When you just do a lap and you think ‘damn, it’s going to be tough to beat that’... I put everything out on the line and it’s what we needed to do.

“We’ve been on the back foot pretty much the whole weekend. We’ve not had the pace of the Ferraris or the Red Bulls, so I had to do something and today I did that, so yeah, a cool lap and a nice way to start the race!”

He added that he enjoyed the sensation of the speed experienced at the Circuit of the Americas. The main race on Oct 20 took place after press time.

Said Norris: “Inside you’re like ‘damn, this is fast’ and it’s exciting and it just gives you a good feeling, it’s bumpy and it’s fast, especially sector one. So it puts a smile on your face, and definitely ending quickest puts the biggest smile on your face too.”

The Briton said it had been a tough weekend for McLaren.

“A tough day, a tough weekend for us, but we changed quite a bit, I think we reviewed everything we could and we made the improvements we needed to make, so maybe we weren’t the quickest car out there today,” said Norris.

“Carlos (Sainz) said he was going to go quicker, Max (Verstappen) said he was going to go quicker, so I’m lucky but I’ll take it.”

Verstappen added: “On the first lap in Q3, I lost quite a bit of time. That’s unfortunate, but I knew we had another run, but then, unfortunately, I couldn’t finish the lap – otherwise, we had a good shot.”

He added that winning the morning sprint race had given confidence back to Red Bull as he and the team aim to end an eight-race winless run dating back to the Spanish Grand Prix in May.

“It seemed that we were competitive. So we made some minor changes on the car, which felt nice,” he said.

Things are looking less positive for Lewis Hamilton, who described his Mercedes car as a “nightmare” to drive on when a front suspension problem led to his stunning qualifying flop. He was eliminated in 19th place in Q1, his worst performance at one of his favourite tracks, where he had never previously failed to qualify in the top five and had taken pole thrice and won a record six times.

His teammate George Russell crashed in the final minutes of the session after qualifying sixth.

Seven-time world champion Hamilton said he knew something was wrong with his car on the formation lap ahead of the morning sprint race.

“We had some sort of failure from the formation lap, in the front suspension, and I had that throughout the sprint race – and that made the balance really difficult,” he said. “We did make changes in the direction we would’ve done yesterday, but the car was a nightmare today in qualifying.” AFP