How good did Lando Norris have to be to take pole position for the United States Grand Prix?
Very good — very good.
“It was the best of my career,” he said. “It was just a very nice lap.”
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Norris shouldn’t have been a pole contender. While McLaren had clearly improved since sprint qualifying, when it appeared to be the fourth-fastest car behind Red Bull Racing, Mercedes and Ferrari, Max Verstappen remained supreme.
The Dutchman won the sprint easily from pole, and he comfortably topped Q1 and Q2 ahead of the pole-getting session.
“It feels a bit like old times,” he smiled forebodingly after winning the short race.
But he left the tiniest of openings in Q3. He’d been more than 0.2 seconds up on Norris when he sailed marginally wide of the apex at turn 19, allowing the Briton to get back on equal turns at the final corner.
It took the effort of Norris’s life, but he completed the tour 0.031 seconds ahead to take provisional pole.
“It just came together perfectly. It was a very, very good lap — probably quite comfortably the best of my career,” he reiterated.
It was a remarkable turnaround for Norris and McLaren, who seemed condemned to their first lukewarm performance in months. The team has brought several upgrades to Texas — though not as many as first foreshadowed, with a wholesale floor change left for a later date — but seemed to struggle to match them to the track.
The Circuit of the Americas is always a peculiar challenge despite its conventional layout. Bumps manifested by shifting soils are always challenging, and the massive resurfacing work done ahead of this year’s race has generated plenty of grip-limited mistakes.
But the team learnt a lot during sprint qualifying and the 100-kilometre race, and the changes they made ahead of the weekend’s most important grid-setting session brought Norris much closer to the front — close enough to take advantage of Verstappen’s error and then cash in when George Russell forced an early end to qualifying before the Dutchman could reply.
The result is the front row Formula 1 so sorely wanted arriving in the Untied States.
The title contenders will start first and second, the challenger ahead of the incumbent.
Having lost two points to Verstappen in the sprint, Norris now has a chance to hit back — and the grid is set far more favourably than in the sprint for him to generate a bigger swing to his advantage.
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