Norris "just pushed a bit hard and made too many mistakes"
On the back of a tough end to his Montreal qualifying, McLaren driver Lando Norris conceded that he "just pushed a bit hard and [made] too many mistakes."
McLaren endured a tough opening day at the Canadian Grand Prix, but the papaya team managed to make some progress for the final practice. Lando Norris set the benchmark in FP3 while his team-mate Oscar Piastri was still struggling, and he also clipped the Wall of Champions and punctured his rear wheel.
Norris was in contention for pole position, having set encouraging lap time in the early part of qualifying. However, he made a mistake on his first push lap in Q3, and he made another mistake on his last flying lap which left him in a disappointing seventh place on the grid.
His team-mate Piastri once again raised his bar in qualifying, and looked more and more comfortable in his MCL39 with every lap. However, it was still not enough to beat the Mercedes of George Russell and the Red Bull of Max Verstappen.
Reflecting on his qualifying performance, Norris conceded that he "just pushed a bit hard and [made] too many mistakes."
"A tough Qualifying and not the result I was after. We were lacking a little bit of pace to the quickest cars, and I've pushed a bit too much to try and find that. I just pushed a bit hard and too many mistakes.
"The attention is now on tomorrow and working hard with the team to recover positions and move forward to secure strong Championship points in the race."
When asked what might have been possible, he replied: "Good enough for a top three, probably not good enough for pole. Hard to know how much was maybe the medium tyre performing that little bit better, especially when the grip comes up. Maybe the medium is a touch better but it was a gamble.
Asked why McLaren refused to use the medium Pirelli tyres, Norris noted: "It was a risk and I guess every team has their own opinion on what they thought was best and clearly we didn't think that was going to be better. But we did what we did and I just didn't put it together when I needed to."
