Lando Norris says he expects Sunday's Italian Grand Prix to be a tough challenge for McLaren, which is struggling to trim off as much downforce as possible on the MCL60 to make it go quicker down the straights at Monza.
McLaren has been the success story of the summer, after a series of upgrades rejuvenated its performance following a poor start to the season.
But Norris says that the Autodromo Nazionale Monza is not the type of circuit that plays to the car's strength, and that will leave it vulnerable to attacks from midfield rivals like Mercedes, Aston Martin and Williams n the race.
Norris only managed to finish ninth in the final round of qualifying on Saturday, putting him two places behind his team mate Oscar Piastri and leaving him sandwiched between Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso.
"I don't think we expected a lot more," he told the media in the paddock after the end of the session. "We said it already on Thursday that it was gonna be a tough weekend for us on the long straights.
"We've improved a little bit but we're still a long, long way down on the others, so it's going to be a tough Sunday," he lamented. "I don't think we can really go forward [from P9], we're too slow on the straights to overtake.
"We basically cut everything off the wing that we could," he replied when asked about the team's efforts to reduce drag this week. "We just have an inefficient car and that doesn't allow us to race very well.
"We'll try to get some positions off the line and the first lap, but the Mercedes is always very strong on race pace," he said. "And the Williams, no matter how quick we are on the corners, they're too quick for us on the straights."
As for his own performance today, Norris said: "Not my best qualifying, but not a bad day. Struggled a little bit to find the last couple of things on the final lap.
"I was probably a little bit too close to the car ahead, that compromised me maybe a little bit more than I was hoping for. Other than that I think it was pretty much as good as we were going to get between Oscar and myself."
Piastri will start from seventh, which he felt was not a bad result for him in the circumstances.
"I felt like I did a pretty decent lap at the end there and there wasn’t too much more left in it. I’m happy with what I did. Of course, I would like to be a bit more competitive but I think that’s about where we expected to be.
"We’ll do some work tonight to prepare for the race and see what we can do tomorrow," the Australian rookie concluded.
Team principal Andrea Stella felt that everyone had performed well in what had been an intense qualifying session this weekend. "In terms of performance, today we didn't have enough speed to compete for the top rows of the grid.
"However, we are still happy that we have two cars in Q3," he said. "We now look forward to tomorrow. It will be challenging with the tyres in hot conditions, but we will try to extract the most out of it and score good points."
McLaren are currently in fifth place in the constructors standings, comfortably ahead of Alpine but a long way off Ferrari in front of them because of their initial poor start to the current campaign.
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