Austin (AFP) – Lando Norris oozed satisfaction on Saturday after beating series leader and three-time champion Max Verstappen to pole position for Sunday’s United States Grand Prix. The McLaren driver clocked a best lap in one minute and 32.330 seconds to outpace his Red Bull rival, who leads the title race by 54 points with six races remaining, by 0.031 seconds.
“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!”
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He added that he enjoyed the sensation of the speed experienced at the Circuit of the Americas. “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.”
He 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. 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 said: “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, I think we had a really 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,” he said. “So we made some minor changes on the car, which felt nice. I hope that also will be a positive for tomorrow.”
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