Portugal GP: Qualifying Notes – McLaren

Lando Norris: “Quite happy with today. A bit annoyed because we could have been a few positions up – maybe three – and fourth on the grid, I would say. I can be sure to say that. I was caught.” My Q3 did two laps on the new tire because another car was pulling back from the last corner in front of me, so I had to stop the lap pretty early, which was frustrating.

“Besides that, I’m happy with my performance today. The car was good. Difficult to drive but fast and surprisingly I was still P7 so I’m happy. There are definitely some positives and we’ll see.” what we can do in the race tomorrow. “

Daniel Ricciardo: “A frustrating day. We had a positive day yesterday, so I wouldn’t have bet on it today. I’m not sure where it went wrong, we have to look at it tonight. Q1 is going very quickly and we have just not doing clean laps. The medium tire felt pretty good and I was pretty happy. Then the first lap on the soft was a bit interrupted by traffic at the beginning of the lap, and the end of the lap was just a bit chaotic tried to drive again but the tire fell off very quickly and we just didn’t have the pace.

“P16 is far from where I want to be, so all I have to do is figure it out, get some sleep and wake up tomorrow to do better.”

Andreas Seidl, Team Principal: “P7 and P16 are not what we had in mind when we arrived on the track this morning. At the moment we are definitely disappointed with the qualifying result.

“Unfortunately, after three good training sessions in which he felt much more comfortable in the car, Daniel was unable to repeat his performance today in the first quarter, which unfortunately meant an early end to his qualifying. Tonight we and Daniel ‘I’ll analyze what has happened.

“On Lando’s side, it was great again to see the car’s potential on this track with Lando in shape behind the wheel. The end of P7 is a disappointment at the moment considering the lap time Lando completed in the second quarter Has.” The track slowed down in the third quarter and conditions were very mixed, but a better position was still possible. Unfortunately, on his last run in the third quarter, he was caught by another car slowing down in front of him, so he didn’t get a chance to adjust to the new tires.

“On the positive side, it was great again to see the potential competitiveness of the car resulting from the continued development and hard work of the team at the plant. These performance improvements are very encouraging and we will take advantage of them.” them with us in the race tomorrow.

“As always, we will leave this disappointment behind us as soon as possible and concentrate on tomorrow when points are distributed. We have two good drivers and a great team that will try to fight back tomorrow.”

Check out our Saturday gallery of Portimao here.