JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia — It had all been going so much better for Lando Norris in Saudi Arabia.
One week after a rough Bahrain Grand Prix Formula One weekend, where he admitted to feeling “a bit clueless” with McLaren’s 2025 car after struggling to sixth place on the grid and finishing third in a mistake-laden race, Norris was back to flying.
He’d beaten teammate and anticipated title rival Oscar Piastri by almost one tenth of a second in Q1 and by half a tenth in Q2. Now it was about stringing it together when it really mattered in the final fight for Jeddah pole position.
Norris would get two shots at a pole lap. He opened his first aggressively, kissing the inside curb at Turn 1 on the left before turning right into Turn 2, then getting on the power for the blast through to Turn 4, a quick left-hander to start a long sequence of sweeping corners.
Mastering the Jeddah track, one of the fastest street circuits on the F1 calendar, is all about confidence. And as Norris downshifted three times and tipped his McLaren car left, that confidence was suddenly sapped as he felt the car understeer away from him and toward the raised exit curb.
He tried his best to save it, sawing at the steering wheel to catch his error, pointing the car back in the right direction for a split second. But it was still traveling too fast to arrest its jerk left towards an inevitable clout with the wall after Norris had briefly gone airborne. Qualifying over. No time on the board in Q3. Tenth place on the grid.
Norris’s engineer, Will Joseph, asked if he was OK, receiving no reply. On a second ask, Norris replied: “Yeah, I’m good.”
He took a few seconds, exhaling slowly, before resting his head against the rear of the cockpit.
“F—ing idiot,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it, mate,” Joseph reassured him before receiving an apology from Norris.
He’d worked all weekend trying to respond after a messy Bahrain weekend that Piastri had gone on to dominate, to wrestle back the early momentum in the 2025 title race. All of it came apart in an instant.
Piastri would miss out on the Jeddah pole to Max Verstappen by just 0.01 seconds. But he will still start eight places ahead of his teammate and title rival, leaving Norris with an almighty job to try and get back in the fight on Sunday night.
“I was doing well until then and feeling comfortable,” Norris told reporters after qualifying. “I’m not going to be proud, I’m not going to be happy. I’ve let myself down and let the team down.”
Norris was in no mood to retract his self-criticism, which, for the second week in a row, was sharp. Although he needed reminding of what he’d called himself on the radio, Norris didn’t change his view. “Makes sense,” he said. “I agree with it.”
Norris dismissed the suggestion that the crash had anything to do with the lack of handling comfort he’s felt with the new McLaren car so far this year, which has forced him to adjust his driving style. It was just another small yet incredibly costly mistake.
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella told reporters that Norris was struggling to get the most out of the car at the end of qualifying, just as it did in Bahrain. “When he tries to squeeze this extra millisecond, just the car doesn’t respond as he expects,” Stella said. “I think this is a behavior that kind of surprises him. Today, it surprised him.”
Norris didn’t curse when lambasting himself in Bahrain, where he didn’t crash. However, he was slightly more measured after qualifying in Jeddah, chiefly because he’s not feeling as lost with his car’s handling as he was one week ago. He also wasn’t quite so doom-and-gloom in his throw forward to the race, as challenging as it may be to move up the order.
“(I’ve) got to look at the bright side and hope we can have a good race tomorrow,” Norris said. “I don’t think it’s going to be an easy one, because I don’t think it’s easy to overtake around here. But we have a strong car.”
Norris feels happier with the McLaren car in Jeddah. “(It’s) just a very different layout, it’s a lot grippier,” he said. “The grip here is incredible. (I’m) happier. We’ve tried to work on a few things, I’ve worked a lot on my driving. (That’s) got nothing to do with it, this is just a separate mistake.”
Separating a single mistake without letting his confidence unspool will be necessary for Norris — particularly in a season-long championship fight with Piastri and the ongoing threat from brilliant eventual polesitter Verstappen. No title bid goes without mistakes or big setbacks. It’s the responses that matter. In Bahrain, he at least made an eye-catching and positive start, albeit one where he’d lined up too far forward in his grid box and copped a penalty.
“These guys are race drivers,” Stella said. “They’ve done these days their entire lives. I’m sure it’s not the only disappointing Saturday that Lando has experienced in his career. We are all, drivers included, very thick-skinned, very used to that, very determined. If anything, in the (post-qualifying) briefing, our focus immediately shifted onto what tires for tomorrow? How do we try to use the performance that we showed on Friday?
“It’s not only a morale aspect, but a methodological aspect (of) how do I move from this point to, ‘good, there’s going to be a race tomorrow, let’s actually use this disappointment as additional determination.’”
If Norris can claw his way back up the order on Sunday and show the kind of race pace that clearly makes McLaren the team to beat based on the long run times clocked through FP1 and briefly in FP2, then it’ll be a big boost for his confidence.
“Hopefully, Lando will have the opportunity to use the race pace. Hopefully, without too much traffic, that he had shown on Friday,” Stella said on F1TV. “It was an exceptionally strong race pace and tomorrow (that) will be quite useful to recover some positions.”
The difficulty for Norris from a championship outlook is that his two primary rivals, Verstappen and Piastri, locked out the front row after a compelling fight for pole with Mercedes’ George Russell after his crash.
Verstappen pipped Piastri by just one-thousandth on their first runs before his final effort, which was a critical hundredth up on the McLaren driver and a tenth up on Russell. Just as he did in Japan two weeks ago, he’d wrung every last millisecond out of the Red Bull, finally getting the setup into the sweet spot to find peak performance, itself a complex dark art with the RB21.
This would always be a better weekend for Verstappen and Red Bull than in Bahrain, as the RB21 benefits from track layouts with more high-speed, flowing corners and running over less abrasive asphalt. But the Dutchman still required supreme confidence to nail his final effort in Q3 to beat Piastri.
“It’s super hard because some corners, like you want to try and be super close to the wall,” Verstappen said. “Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t.” He famously discovered the latter at the end of qualifying in 2021 when he crashed at the final corner, losing out on pole to then title rival Lewis Hamilton in the process.
“It is a very tough track,” Verstappen explained. “Every time you go out, it’s a little bit like Monaco, but much more high speed. Where you go out and say, ‘OK, let’s get ready to send it.’ Some other tracks, it just happens a bit more naturally. It requires big commitment from every driver to try and be as close to the walls as possible.”
Verstappen mentioned the word “rhythm” when explaining his push to pole. While Norris sat in the garage at the end of both Q1 and Q2, his passage to the next session safely assured, Verstappen was still out pushing. It was partly out of necessity, given that McLaren had lapped quicker on the initial runs and appeared out of reach in the hotter FP3 session earlier on Saturday. Nevertheless, it helped Verstappen build up his confidence by running those extra miles and threading the needle between the walls.
Norris’s early championship lead now looks precarious heading into race day – he’s just three points clear of Piastri right now and eight in front of Verstappen. But he must take the better feeling with the McLaren this weekend and deploy it to regain his confidence and get back to the level it had been right up to the moment he crashed out.
Coming away with that reset achieved and back in a good groove, even if he trails Verstappen and Piastri home on Sunday, could be an essential turning point for Norris and his mindset in this year’s brewing title fight.
(Top photo: Kym Illman/Getty Images)
