Norris 'expected' McLaren's early qualifying exit in Miami

Lando Norris said he wasn't surprised when both he and McLaren team mate Oscar Piastri were eliminated at the end of the first round of qualifying for Sunday's Miami Grand Prix.

It means that Norris will start the race from 16th on the grid, while Piastri will be on the back row alongside fellow rookie driver Logan Sargeant in the Williams.

It's a bitter comedown for Norris who ended Friday's practice at the Miami International Autodrome sixth fastest. But at the same time, it was apparently no surprise for the 23-year-old Briton.

“I think it was as expected to be honest,” he told Formula1.com. “It was a little bit hotter on the track, so that makes the balance go away from us a little bit. It makes it a lot tougher inside the car.

“It makes our issues bigger and to a bigger extent, so tougher to put laps together and execute what you need to execute in qualifying.

"The underlying issue is we just don’t have the pace in the corners or down the straight," he admitted. "Just a struggle.

"Not the result we wanted but almost the best we could have done," he sighed. "I made a small mistake which might have cost me one position, but the fact is we just didn’t have the pace to be competitive today.

"It’s a shame but we’ll have to try to do what we can to go forwards tomorrow."

• Read also: Perez on pole from Alonso in dramatic finish to Miami GP qualifying

And Norris hinted that tomorrow could be much better for McLaren: “We’ve been saving maybe a couple of seconds in the pocket for tomorrow, so we just want to have a fun race.”

As for Piastri, the Australian suggested that the hot and humid conditions in Miami on Saturday together with gusting winds had been hampering the team's efforts to get the best out of the MCL60.

“It’s very, very close but just tricky to get it all together there I think," he said. "Struggling in the hotter conditions so we need to find out why.

"I'm disappointed to be out in Q1. It was very close between everyone around us. We knew it was going to be tough today and so it proved.

“The car’s not particularly tricky, it’s quite low grip but it’s just not particularly fast which is the issue," he mused. “We’ll have a look at what we can do to make it better. We just struggled today as a team."

"Overall a difficult Saturday for us," summarised team principal Andrea Stella. "From FP3, we were aware that we had lost some relative competitiveness in these hot conditions.

"Things were a little better in qualifying compared to FP3, but not enough to progress from Q1.

"The group of cars around us is exceptionally compact and the difference between being out in Q1 or having both cars in Q3, like we had in Baku, is tiny.

"We know this result can happen until we improve the car further, which we plan to do over the course of the season.

"In the short term, we stay calm, we learn from today and prepare for the race tomorrow, where points are ultimately distributed."

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