Lando Norris deemed himself satisfied overall with the outcome of his qualifying session at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, where the McLaren driver clocked in third at the end of the Q3 shootout.
Despite a strong showing early on in the session when he topped both Q1 and Q2, Norris struggled to extract more from his car in the final segment.
His first Q3 flyer left him only fifth in the pecking order which encouraged to reassess his approach for his final attempt.
“It was difficult to get everything out, that was probably the biggest thing today,” Norris told Sky F1.
“I found the limit very quickly in Q1 and Q2, and obviously things were looking good. But I just found the limit and struggled to get much more out of the car in the final two laps.
“I tried in Q3 run one, clearly it didn’t work, so I just had to drive much more under the limit in the second run.”
Norris’ final time was a slight improvement over his best Q2 lap but still left him narrowly behind Max Verstappen while poleman Carlos was out of reach for both drivers.
“Maybe we could have had Max, but he did a good lap,” Norris added. “Mine was not as clean as maybe what I would have liked. I just wanted to get a good-ish lap in. Certainly P3 I’m still pretty happy with.”
Sainz’s impressive pole-winning effort left Norris with little optimism that McLaren could outpace the Scuderia in Sunday’s race.
“It’s tough, the Ferrari is just very fast,” he remarked. “Even if you look at last weekend, they were quicker in qualifying and quicker in the race.”
Norris believes that the best opportunity for McLaren to challenge Ferrari will come at the start of the race.
“We don’t have any evidence at the minute that’s saying we’re going to be much quicker than them in the race. So I think turn one, lap one will be our best opportunity,” he said.
“Ferrari are just doing things well at the minute. They’re performing well, Carlos obviously produced some very nice laps at the end but no chance I’m going three-and-a-half tenths quicker like he did today.
“So we’ve accepted that they’re probably a bit quicker than we are at the minute, but definitely [there are] plenty of the cars we can try to beat and we need to beat.”
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