Lando Norris will start Sunday’s Monaco Grand Prix from fifth place after an excellent effort in his MCL36 car for McLaren F1 Team. The Briton was helped out by a last-minute red flag that stopped the likes of Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso improving upon their times, meaning he will start alongside George Russell on the third row of the grid.
In the dying minutes of Qualifying Three, Sergio Pérez lost the back end of his Oracle Red Bull Racing car at the exit of Turn Eight, heavily damaging his rear wing and bringing out the yellow flags. Carlos Sainz was unable to react in time and spun his Scuderia Ferrari car after braking too hard, collecting the Mexican and blocking the circuit. The red flags were immediately waved, and all flying laps were aborted.
Norris says that he is happy with fifth, the same position that he qualified in for the 2021 Monaco Grand Prix, and that he couldn’t have extracted much more out of his car. Out-qualifying both Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team cars was quite the surprise heading into this weekend, though the number four driver has consistently been on the pace throughout all of the practice sessions.
“I’m happy with today. I think it was the maximum we could achieve. The car was good all weekend and I think today we showed that we extracted a lot out of the car, and we put in some good laps,” the McLaren driver explained.
Norris has already started thinking of his strategy for tomorrow, where he will hope to keep the Mercedes and Alpine cars behind him – though this shouldn’t be as difficult as it normally would be due to the narrow nature of Monaco limiting overtaking opportunities.
“It wasn’t quite enough to be ahead of the top two teams but good enough to be ahead of everyone else, which is always the next step. So, I’m happy but there is one more job to do tomorrow.”
“The focus is to try and go forward if possible – but it’s difficult – so we will try to stay where we are as a minimum and get some good points.”
“It’s not the result I wanted” – Daniel Ricciardo
With talks of his future at McLaren and in the FIA Formula 1 World Championship being a lot more frequent, Daniel Ricciardo has not had a good weekend so far; crashing his car heavily in Free Practice Two and only qualifying fourteenth on the grid for Sunday’s race.
The Australian says that the crash in practice broke his rhythm, and once he regained that rhythm, he was unable to up his pace to match the others in the second stage of qualifying:
“It’s not the result I wanted. I was just trying to get back into the flow of it in FP3, and then we made a few set-up changes for qualifying. Q1 felt a bit more competitive, and I think we did some decent laps.”
“There were a couple of mistakes here and there, but I felt like the pace was in it at the time. And then Q2, when everyone was able to make that step, I struggled to get more out of the car and felt I was at the limit. We’ll keep at it and hopefully it rains tomorrow.”
A lot of teams will be hoping for rain tomorrow as this will not only improve your chances at gaining positions in a much-more tricky race, but also the strategy in a potential wet-to-dry race will shake the standings up a bit. For Ricciardo, making up places and finishing in the points is crucial for his hopes at a 2023 Formula 1 seat.
