'Insanely difficult' McLaren had pace for front row - Norris

Lando Norris said his McLaren at the Circuit of the Americas was the worst car he’s ever had to drive after he qualified a disappointing eighth for the United States Grand Prix.

Norris suffered a difficult Q3, with his first lap compromised by a gust of wind in the final sector that put him more than a second down on Antonelli’s pole time, while his second attempt was deleted for exceeding track limits.

Had the deleted time stood, the reigning champion would have started only two places higher, in sixth.

But having topped Q1, the Englishman believed the pace was there to have started on the front row if only he had been able to harness it on a clean lap.

“The car was very strong today in terms of pace [but] insanely difficult to drive — probably the hardest car I’ve ever had to drive in my life,” he said.

“But it was good enough for P2, so I should be P2, but I’m P8, so clearly I did a very bad job today.”

He will start one place behind Oscar Piastri, who was 0.768s down on pole position after failing to improve on his first Q3 lap, as was the case with most drivers contending inside the top 10.

The Australian has never counted COTA among his best tracks, but though he admitted Norris was getting more out of the McLaren than he was, he said he wasn’t surprised neither driver could string together a competitive lap.

“It’s been tough from lap 1, to be honest,” he said. “Just trying to get performance out of the car has been very, very challenging.

“I think at points in qualifying — for Lando, at least — it looked like there was potential in it, and I think we both kind of felt there is potential in it, but the difference [between] extracting that potential and not is like 0.5s.

“It’s been very, very tough to get that lap time out of the car. I’ve not managed it at all, but I think when either of us has really pushed the boundaries, we can’t keep it on the track.”

Piastri pointed to some fundamental characteristics of the 2026 car being particularly poorly suited to the conditions in Austin, which punished drivers who got too close to their grip limit.

“I think at the moment there’s probably a bit of an element of we’re probably a couple of tenths off Mercedes and Red Bull, and naturally as drivers you try and make that up as well, so I think there’s probably a little element of that,” he said.

“The car in general just needs to be driven on a knife edge all the time.

“I think at a track like this, where there are so many sequences of corners, so many bumps, it really doesn’t take much to go wrong at all for it to go very wrong.”

Though Piastri has a long-running mismatch with this circuit and has struggled all year in difficult grip conditions, he separated his personal tribulations from those of the car this weekend.

“I think today I did a reasonable job in the areas that I really wanted to focus on, but just trying to put a lap together has been almost impossible,” he said.

“I’ve not been anywhere near as competitive as I wanted to be. I think in the corners that I thought would be a struggle and have been types of corners that have been a struggle this year, it’s been pretty good this weekend, but it’s more just been about trying to get everything in the lap together — that’s been the real challenge.

“I don’t think it’s quite the same picture as it has been earlier in the season, but the end result is still the same, so it’s a bit of a shame, but I’m not too disappointed in that, because I think the areas I’ve been working on are still showing progress.”