Lando Norris explains McLaren improvement and eyes Mercedes battle

Lando Norris has revealed how pleased he is with finishing fourth fastest in qualifying for Sunday’s Australian Grand Prix, and revealed he’s eyeing a wheel-to-wheel battle with George Russell in tomorrow’s race.

The McLaren team have had a difficult start to the season but Friday’s running in Melbourne suggested that they had found some pace and qualifying on Saturday confirmed that.

Indeed, Norris posted the fourth-quickest time whilst team-mate Daniel Ricciardo was seventh, and that means they have the two Mercedes cars of Lewis Hamilton and Russell in between them.

Asked by Sky if he felt as though this was on the cards before the session, though, Norris suggested that it’s perhaps down to the circuit layout and McLaren still have progress to make:

“Oh no, no. I mean we struggled to get out of Q1 in Bahrain and almost made it to Q3 in Saudi but yeah it’s good. We’ve made some small steps as a team but realistically it’s just that the car is quicker on this track compared to some of the others and that’s the main part.”

Even so, it’s nice to see the papaya-clad cars back up towards the right end of the field and Norris is looking forward to battling the Mercedes’, and George Russell, who was stood beside him in the interview with Sky.

“It’s been a while actually; F2 I would say since our last good battles. I think we can have some good racing tomorrow and hopefully more often in the future but normally the race pace from the Mercs tends to be a bit stronger than ours so we’ll see what we can do, but we have better pace than we expected today so hopefully that can continue into tomorrow.”

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