Lando Norris ended qualifying on P3, slightly behind his rookie teammate Oscar Piastri, but once out of the car it was all happiness and satisfaction for the young Briton.
“It’s been a very good day for us. As a team, a P2 and a P3, a great job by Oscar today and, as usual, by Max, but a good day for us. To be P2 and P3, I was pretty happy with my laps.”
The last lap was unfortunately not good enough for an improvement, but that’s what happens on such a demanding track, Norris explains.
“Tricky, it’s not an easy circuit to put everything together always, but it’s so quick around here, the smallest mistake can make a bit amount of lap time, you know? I’m happy. It’s been a good day, good positions for tomorrow.”
According to the McLaren driver his qualifying performance does not come a total surprise, as the team looked strong from the get-go on Friday.
“I think we’re very happy as a team,” he said. “Also, for myself, I’m pretty happy with the improvements we made. But I think all weekend we’ve been strong, from FP1 onwards, the car has been feeling good. We’ve made some good steps forward throughout the weekend as well.
“And I think that’s proved, to be ahead of Ferrari. I think we thought it’d be close with Ferrari, so to be ahead, and have two cars ahead was an even bigger bonus.
“But like Oscar said, I think we would have loved to have been a bit closer to Max. But it proved not to be the case. So yeah, a good day. Not bad. I wouldn’t say they were not my best laps. I think there were some very good laps but just a couple of things may be holding us back a little bit. But otherwise, we’re happy.”
As for the race tomorrow, the one-time polesitter hopes they can fight Red Bull and emulate the rich history his team has in Japan.
“Some of the most amazing McLaren stories come from here in Japan. We are of course hoping for a good result tomorrow. We want to continue that tradition but it’s going to be difficult.
“Max is doing a very good job, Red Bull are always doing a very good job, so we’ll do our best to make their life difficult and have a good race tomorrow.”
And if their pace isn’t quite a match for the Red Bull, Norris had a little suggestion for his Kiwi teammate for tomorrow.
“We’re going to try [taking on Max Verstappen]. I mean, if he’s leading by Turn 2 there’s not a lot you can really do. If you want to emulate Prost, Oscar, into Turn 1… I mean Ayrton Senna into Turn 1 you can do that happily,” Norris joked. “It would be lovely for me! So yeah, I think we’ll try. I think our race pace is decent. It’s definitely not going to be as good as the Red Bull here but we’ll do our best.”
Realistically speaking it would be a fight with Ferrari and Mercedes, he added, explaining that they do feel confident about their own race pace.
“I think just the knowledge of our general pace and competitive pace… Mercedes are always very strong on a Sunday. But I think we’ve been strong all weekend from qualifying runs but also high fuel runs.
“So I think we’re hoping for probably an easy race but it’s never going to be an easy race around here so like Oscar said, just with undercut powers and things like that, I’m sure there’s going be a lot going on.”
