McLaren achieved at Paul Ricard its best qualifying result since Austria in 2016, but team boss Andreas Seidl isn't getting carried away with his team's result.
A well-executed qualifying session allowed Lando Norris and Carlos Sainz to ease into the final top-ten shootout where the McLaren duo secured its spot on Sunday's third row, confirming the papaya squad's strong form in France which it displayed at the outset.
"Coming into qualifying after yesterday and FP3, things were looking pretty good," said Norris who outqualified his team mate for the fifth time this season.
"Maybe not so much after FP3 – it got a lot closer than it was yesterday – but we were expecting that and weren’t worried. But it was still going to be very close.
"We made a couple of tweaks before quali, which I think helped. We did what we needed to do and I managed to do a decent lap.
"I messed up the last corner, getting a bit eager and overshot a little bit. Apart from that, it’s obviously a good result – but tomorrow’s the long one. Big thanks to the team."
Sainz admitted that he's had it a bit tougher on his side of the McLaren garage this weekend.
"I would say it’s been a bit of a tough weekend, even if it doesn’t look like it," said the Spaniard.
"I was trying a lot of experimental things yesterday and that probably made me be a bit on the back foot for today.
"I was not fully comfortable with the car, but I still managed to more-or-less recover and feel better today.
"We put in some good laps in quali to reach P6 in front of our rivals, and making it to Q3 with the Medium tyre gives us a good fighting chance for the race. Now we have to finish the job tomorrow!"
©McLaren
The last time McLaren had a car positioned as high up on the grid was when Jenson Button lined up fifth in Austria in 2016.
Having both cars so far up is therefore a massive source of satisfaction and one that confirms the Woking-based team's progressive resurgence.
Yet team boss Seidl reminded everyone that points are only collected on Sundays.
"Congratulations to everyone here at the track and back home at the factory," said the German. "It’s McLaren’s best quali result for quite some time.
"After two solid sessions yesterday and another good free practice this morning, we applied everything we’d learned, including tyre usage, for qualifying.
"But we’re not getting over-excited with this result, we’ll get our heads down and stay fully focussed. Points only get distributed tomorrow."
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