Norris reveals why his car felt "pretty dreadful" in Budapest qualifying
Having failed to concert his impressive practice performance into pole position, McLaren driver Lando Norris conceded that his car felt "pretty dreadful" across the final laps in Q3.
McLaren showed eye-catching pace across the practice sessions, with Lando Norris dominating the Friday’s practices before his team-mate Oscar Piastri bounced back in the third and final session.
However, the MCL39 looked to struggle slightly when conditions changed for qualifying. Despite this, it looked to all the world that Norris and Piastri will battle it out for the pole position as they topped the timing sheets in Q1 and Q2.
However, they were unable to improve their times on their second set of soft tyres massively, whilst Ferrari's Charles Leclerc found a big improvement to snatch away the pole position from Piastri and Norris who will line up second and third on the grid on Sunday.
Asked to reflect on his Saturday at the Hungaroring, Norris added: "Q2 felt very good, felt confident to improve. So, into Q3, aiming for a similar lap time, similar limits, and just felt pretty dreadful.
"Same things. I wasn't surprised that I was a 15.4 in the first run. But in the second lap, it's just hard to know how much more to push or not push.
"And I was like, oh, it's a much better lap, and I was 15.4 again. So just similar thing. The wind has such big effects on the car when you're driving.
"It's quite easy for it to be half a second swing. So yeah, frustrating because we definitely seem to have a good gap, but in Q3 it seemed to drift away from us as a team more than it did for others.
Pressed on to reveal whether the drop in temperatures played a vital role for McLaren to lose their competitive advantage they showed across the practice session, Norris was quick to offer his view: "Just the wind."
Asked to offer his expectations for the Hungarian Grand Prix, Norris singled out Ferrari's Charles Leclerc as McLaren's main threat, albeit he suggested that rain might interrupt normal proceedings in Mogyoród.
"It depends what the weather is. Like the others said, could be some rain, which normally makes things more interesting. But I think we always have, at least in the race, a bit more of an advantage.
"But our main competitor over the last four, five races has been Charles and it's been the Ferrari. So, if there was anyone else that's going to be on pole today, it was going to be Charles.
"And if there's anyone that's going to make our life tough tomorrow, it's going to be the same guy. So yeah, we'll see. It's a long race, things can happen, and hopefully the rain can be on our side maybe," concluded Norris.
