Norris suspects he could have beaten Verstappen with a cleaner lap · RaceFans

Lando Norris believes he could have qualified ahead of his championship rival Max Vertappen, who kept him off the front row of the grid for the Mexican Grand Prix.

The McLaren driver was quickest in Q1 and Q2 but fell to third in the final round of qualifying. His first effort left him only fifth, and though he improved with his final run, Verstappen beat him to second on the grid by less than a tenth of a second.

Norris’ final effort was only four-hundredths of a second better than his best time from Q2. He said he struggled to find any more from his car in the final round. “It was difficult to get everything out, that was probably the biggest thing today,” Norris told Sky.

“I found the limit very quickly in Q1 and Q2, and obviously things were looking good. But I just found the limit and struggled to get much more out of the car in the final two laps.

“I tried in Q3 run one, clearly it didn’t work, so I just had to drive much more under the limit in the second run.”

He said he was “happy” with the result. “I think we’ve just not had the pace of the Ferrari all weekend.

“Maybe we could have had Max, but he did a good lap. Mine was not as clean as maybe what I would have liked. I just wanted to get a good-ish lap in. Certainly P3 I’m still pretty happy with.”

| Become a RaceFans supporter and go ad-free

Carlos Sainz Jnr took pole position for Ferrari and Norris sees no reason to believe McLaren will be quicker than them in the race.

“It’s tough, the Ferrari is just very fast,” he said. “Even if you look at last weekend, they were quicker in qualifying and quicker in the race.

“We don’t have any evidence at the minute that’s saying we’re going to be much quicker than them in the race. So I think turn one, lap one will be our best opportunity.

“Ferrari are just doing things well at the minute. They’re performing well, Carlos obviously produced some very nice laps at the end but no chance I’m going three-and-a-half tenths quicker like he did today. So we’ve accepted that they’re probably a bit quicker than we are at the minute, but definitely [there are] plenty of the cars we can try to beat and we need to beat.”