World champion Lando Norris speaks plainly: “It’s just dreadful”

For Lando Norris, qualifying on the high-speed Monza circuit got off to a much better start than it ended: in the first segment, the defending champion was still third fastest, but in the end he had to settle for the ninth-fastest lap. There was a simple reason for this, as the McLaren star explained after the session.

“I just had no luck; it wasn’t a particularly bad qualifying session. We had a few problems with the brakes today, and in the end I just couldn’t manage to find a good slipstream. Everyone tries to do that on this circuit, of course, and it didn’t work out for me on either my first or second Q3 attempt,” reported the current fourth-placed driver in the World Championship.

“So I was just unlucky, because it wasn’t a bad lap. It wasn’t my best lap either, as there were a few things I could have done better. But the biggest loss of time was down to the lack of a slipstream,” added the 26-year-old Briton.

The braking problem caused him particular trouble, explained the thirteen-time Grand Prix winner: “When the brakes don’t do what you expect, it’s just dreadful. We’re sometimes braking here from 325 km/h down to 80 km/h, and you just want to be able to anticipate what’s going to happen. You want to feel everything just right.”

“Otherwise, you simply lack the necessary confidence. It’s very easy to lock up the wheels. That’s no excuse for why things didn’t go so well today, but of course it didn’t help either,” Norris clarified. At the same time, he insisted: “I can’t complain; I just should have managed a better lap the first time round, that’s all.”

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