Norris: 'Hopefully Max doesn't hold me up like he did in Monaco'

Lando Norris took a look around, saw Max Verstappen and Carlos Sainz too on the long straight after qualifying, and suddenly realised he had put in a top performance in his McLaren. Starting from third place, the Brit will start Sunday's Spanish Grand Prix in what could be an exciting race.

McLaren are not having a great season so far. The Woking-based team have been short of speed for weeks. At Grands Prix, Norris and teammate Oscar Piastri are invariably passed by faster teams. Red Bull Racing anyway, but also Aston Martin, Ferrari and Mercedes. Yet Norris managed to keep these teams (partially) behind him in Barcelona.

Whether the same will happen during Sunday's race? Norris isn't sure. "Not very confident," he said at the press conference. "You never know, the pace could be mega and I could overtake Max. Hopefully, he doesn‘t hold me up like in Monaco," Norris laughed. 

Circuit played into McLaren's hands

On Friday, the McLaren was nowhere, a day later, the team are on the second row. "And like I said, we've not really changed the car that much. So there was nothing which was giving me a lot of confidence or any reasons why we were going to be that good today," Norris said. "We're still pretty poor in many areas, but high speed has always been one of our strengths for years and slow speed quite the opposite."

The removal of the chicane at the end of a lap was also to McLaren's advantage. "I think this layout has helped us, I was flat in turn three, flat to turn nine. Probably one of the few guys apart from Red Bull who did that.  So yeah, I think it's a track where more of the strengths have been able to be shown. Even though Monaco wasn't bad, we do struggle a lot in the slow-speed corners. So that's still the area we know we want to take big steps forward," he concluded.