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Norris' real opportunity after coming from nowhere with 'masterpiece' lap - Published It says everything about the remarkable lap with which Lando Norris took pole position for the Spanish Grand Prix that it was a toss-up as to which was the most important and impressive of two striking statistics. Was it that Norris had improved by a stunning 0.701 seconds between his two laps in final qualifying, to come from nowhere to take a pole that had not looked to be a possibility to McLaren? Or was it that in beating runaway championship leader Kimi Antonelli's Mercedes by 0.011 seconds, Norris had made a mistake at the final corner that cost him more than 0.3secs? McLaren team principal Andrea Stella described Norris' performance as "a masterpiece" and "one of the most impressive laps that I witnessed as somebody that watches telemetry in 450 grands prix, because we were not honestly performing to the level of scoring pole position". As Stella is someone who has worked with Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso, his comments carry weight. - Norris takes Madrid pole with 'gorgeous' lap - Published9 hours ago - How to follow Spanish Grand Prix on the BBC - Published9 hours ago Norris said: "Most tracks, you know what is perfect, what you really want to achieve in a perfect lap. A very good day is when you get pretty close to that. "Until the last corner, I think I matched that perfection level in pretty much every corner. "So, yeah, it's a dream to achieve a lap like that. So it was easily one of the best laps I've ever done. "Everything came together perfectly. I got the timing of everything so dialled in, with the kerb hits, how you hit the kerb, brake points, all of these things. It's so easy to make a mistake on a day like today and a track like this, but really I just got it right on the most important lap I had to do. "So, very excited, very pleased and it's not often you achieve a lap like today and it's a pretty awesome feeling when you do." That last corner, Norris said, "I thought I was in the wall and that was just from over-pushing. I got a bit excited in the car and I just over-pushed the entry." Stella said: "The most impressive thing is the fact that it's a pole position despite having lost 0.35secs in the last corner, which means that it would have been a pretty convincing pole position without this issue. "The thing that makes the lap unique when you look especially at the telemetry is the precision - the braking, the speed you carry in entry, the striking of the kerbs, the going on power. Everything is executed with a pretty unique level of precision." Norris does not use a display on his dashboard showing his progress compared with his previous lap, the so-called delta, as most other drivers do. "I don't need my delta," he said. "I can feel when I do what I need to do and when I get a good exit, when I'm on the limit of things. When I'm kind of a bit uncomfortable in corners is normally when it's going pretty well. So, I could feel it and I feel like I just made all the right things. My feet were doing what I wanted, and that's normally when things are going well." Antonelli expecting cautious first 10 laps with high degradation expected The new Madring street circuit is in an unprepossessing location, snaking around an exhibition centre near the Spanish capital's international airport, about a 15-minute drive from the city with no traffic. But as a test for the drivers, it is right up there. "Very high risk" and "less margin than Monaco" were two remarks made by Mercedes driver George Russell over the weekend. The walls are close and the demands of the circuit are amplified by the fact that the barriers angle back towards the track on the exit of many corners, making it all too easy to hit them. Despite that, qualifying ran incident-free, which was very much not the prediction, especially after there were two red flags in final practice earlier in the day, one caused by seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton, the other by Haas driver Oliver Bearman. Whether the race goes the same way is an altogether different matter. This was Norris' third pole of the year, and after the first two he took dominant wins in Hungary and the Netherlands. At those races, though, McLaren were in a very different place. "Tomorrow is going to be a very tough day," Norris said. "It's not going to be as straightforward as in Zandvoort and Budapest. There we were the quickest car. Yes, I'm on pole now, but we're not in the quickest car. It took a perfect lap to get me on pole by 0.011secs today." Norris, it's worth saying, also took pole despite missing virtually all of second practice with a gearbox problem. Not only does that make the achievement all the more impressive, it also means he missed out on potentially crucial information about race-distance running, as that session is when the teams do their race simulations. Tyre degradation is expected to be high. The high-grip, smooth new track surface, combined with the longest pit lane of the year - Norris jokingly described it as "6km long", cut in half as it is by a building - should in theory lead to a one-stop strategy. But the high tyre degradation could well push it to a two-stop, and because teams will try to avoid that, Antonelli said, "probably is going to be grandmother driving in the first 10 laps - we saw how steep the degradation can be, especially if you push too early". In Norris' favour is that overtaking is expected to be especially difficult. The straights are short, and some of the corner entries, which combine braking and turning, mean, as Verstappen put it, "there are no corners where you can pass". The drivers generally liked the challenge of the new track, Norris described it as "a little bit of everything". But all agreed on the fact that the corner entries need to be changed to facilitate racing. Verstappen, who qualified third, said: "You can't overtake. So, in some places, the braking zones, like, they need to learn that it should never be that you have to steer, that you have to combine under braking, because it doesn't allow any kind of overtaking." Antonelli said: "It's going to be tight. I spent two laps behind the Williams, trying to painfully get past. But it's just really difficult. "And when you're behind, it's tough. Yeah, the only thing you can do is try to put pressure on the car in front, trying to make them do mistakes or make them deg a bit more." The difficulty in overtaking is what makes this a real opportunity for Norris to take a third win of the season, even if the McLaren is not the fastest car. As he put it: "It's a long race, it's a new track. You've got to know what corners to push, what corners not to push, all of these different things, what the battery's then going to do. "There's a lot of stuff that I've got to spend my time doing tonight. So, it's probably going to be a late one to try and get ahead of the game in some sorts. But the main part of the job was done today, so that's the bit I'm most happy about." Related topics - Published2 days ago - Published3 days ago
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