Norris was "just not quite in the rhythm" in Monza qualifying
Despite having secured a second spot on the grid for Sunday’s Italian Grand Prix, McLaren's Lando Norris admitted that he was "just not quite in the rhythm."
McLaren displayed strong pace in final practice, but the papaya outfit seemed to struggle a bit in qualifying - at least to their standards.
However, Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri put in a great effort on their final lap in Q3 to end up second and third quickest.
Reflecting on his up-and-downqualifyingsession in which he narrowly got knocked out in Q2, Norris said: "I’ll say no just because it was a pretty bad qualifying from my behalf. I think it was the best lap I did in quali by like six tenths or something.
"It was impressive that I managed to improve so much – or probably impressive that I did such a bad job prior to that.
"But I think Max has been pretty good all weekend. I think also us as a team since FP1 already, we found that we were not quite in as good of a rhythm and had the pace advantage that we’ve had the past few weekends. So of course we wanted P1, but I don’t think we’d be disappointed to take a P2 either.
Explaining his issues behind the wheel of his MCL39, Norris added: "Just I was hitting every kerb possible that I don’t want to hit and just locking up when I shouldn’t lock up. So just not quite in the rhythm.
"It’s not that I’ve not been in the rhythm this weekend. I’ve felt like I’ve done some reasonable laps so far this weekend and I felt like I had some good strengths here and there, but just couldn’t click back into it come quali, until the final lap.
"But that’s also the only lap that I need to do it, so I’m happy that I did it in the end.
Signing off with a word for his expectations for the race, Norris said: "I definitely want to expect that. Everyone knows that our race pace is probably a bigger strength than our quali pace. We’ve proven that many times. But, like Max said, they’ve improved a lot from last year.
"I think coming into the weekend, we probably didn’t expect the Red Bull to be quite as good. But as soon as we did the first few runs, it was clear that they made some good steps compared to last season.
"So we’ll see. His race pace was good on Friday. It wasn’t too dissimilar to ours. So time will tell," Norris concluded.
