Having beating his team-mate to lock out the front row for the Australian Grand Prix, Lando Norris insisted that it was “the perfect way to start” the 2025 F1 season.
Lando Norris was all smiles after qualifying for the Australian Grand Prix, with the McLaren driver beating home favourite Oscar Piastri and Red Bull’s Max Verstappen to pole position.
Although the opening two segments of qualifying had indicated that there will be at least three teams in the hunt for pole position, Norris clocked a time of 1m 15.096s at the end of Q3 to build up a gap of almost four tenths from the quickest non-McLaren driver.
Asked about his pole lap, Norris said: “Good enough, I guess. Tricky because of my first lap and going off track. And just with how tight it’s been, especially with Oscar. But yeah, it’s a tough one because you want to take a lot of risks, especially on this track.
“It’s a track where you’ve got to commit. You know what your target is, and once you turn in you’re kind of hoping for the best in a lot of cases. You want to take those risks.
“Obviously, I took too many on my first lap and got track limits, so I was in a difficult position knowing how much risk I wanted to take. But I put it together well, it was just a clean lap, no mistakes, and that was enough. So happy. A perfect way to start the season.”
Asked whether he had been confident coming into the session, Norris has acknowledged that McLaren had been unsure about the one-lap pace given their slight struggles in Sakhir and Melbourne.
‘I mean, we’ve been confident just because our expectation is… As much as we want to dominate and actually have a result like we’ve just had, it really was not necessarily our expectation to have a bit of a gap to the rest of the cars. And when I say gap, I mean when we put the lap in, we had a bit of a gap, but it’s been difficult.
‘I think one of our struggles has been how difficult it’s been in our car just to execute those qualifying laps and put things together. That’s been something I’ve struggled with this weekend. So to have the kind of pace we had today was not unexpected, but we just weren’t going in thinking, “OK, we’re going to have two-tenths over everyone or one and a half-tenths.”
‘We know we have a good car, mainly because I know I have a very good team around me and everyone back at McLaren and MTC has done an incredible job to keep the car going from last season and improving.”
Although rain is expected to dominate on much of Sunday, Norris is confident that his car will be strong in every conditions
‘I think it’s good. We were decent in Bahrain and I think we’re going to expect to be pretty good here. We were pretty good here last year, and that was with a much worse car.
‘We’re going in with one target, which is to be at the top and to have two cars at the top. But conditions are going to be unexpected, so we just have to go in prepared. That’s all we can really do.’
