Norris working to improve qualifying performances

Lando Norris has been working to improve his qualifying performances as he is expecting the margins to be even tighter in 2024 than last season.

The McLaren driver was particularly harsh on himself in 2023 whenever he didn’t execute a perfect qualifying session, following a number of errors in the second half of the year. Norris says that’s an area he has been focusing on during the off-season, although he still needs to put those ideas to the test in the car later this week.

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“It’s been various things already, both in terms of how I drive, and how I work in extracting the performance during laps,” Norris said. “Understanding these traits and these things and then putting them to the test on the simulator and trying to improve them.

“Sometimes it’s hard to improve various things until you’re actually in the car and performing it. But to the extent of what I can [do], even if it’s mental things, I’ve been trying to work on any area that I can to improve it. Which I would say I’ve done, but it’s always a different experience until you get back in the car and you’re in that moment again, until you can really try things during that pressure and during those moments.

“I’ve done what I can with various things with my team who I have around me, but I guess it’s hard to know until the first qualifying of the season how well those things might work, whether they have or not, and what further things might need to be done to improve on those areas.”

Norris is expecting qualifying to be an area where drivers and teams can find themselves celebrating a strong Q3 result one day and then being eliminated in Q1 the next if they don’t maximize their potential.

“With any regulation, the later it gets in the regulation, the tighter it gets," he said. "It’s normally what we see. It was already one of the tightest years in terms of regulation for quite a long time. Even though it was dominated, probably more than ever, it was probably also the tightest from first to last for the majority of the year.

“Maybe not to win, but maybe looking at second or third place to the back of the grid it’s probably less than half a second. Like with any regulation it’s going to get tighter and maybe the beginning of the season the gap’s going to open and probably get tighter again and we still have another year after this of the same regulation.

“I’m sure we’re in for a couple of years that will be very tight racing. When you don’t have a perfect lap or don’t get something exactly right at times in the past you could get away with it whereas I think you’re going to be able to get away with it less and less. That requires less mistakes, more hard work, learning and perfection to achieve consistent results.”