Lando Norris wants to secure the constructors’ title with a victory for McLaren, and says he is ready for a battle with former teammate Carlos Sainz in the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
Sainz is set to start his final race for Ferrari before being replaced by Lewis Hamilton, and is trying to help it outscore McLaren by 21 points to win the constructors’ championship. Norris will start from pole ahead of teammate Oscar Piastri after McLaren locked out the front row, and the British driver says he’s expecting a fired-up Sainz on Sunday but won’t back down from a fight for victory.
“We’ve got to beat Ferrari,” Norris said. “That’s the aim, but we want to do it in style and we want to win.
“But we’re here to win everywhere it’s possible, and tomorrow we’re going to have a good chance, at least with one of our cars, and we’ll be giving it everything we’ve got, knowing in the back of our minds what we really have to do to achieve our big goals.
“I feel like Zak [Brown, McLaren Racing CEO] is probably more nervous that we’re first and second than if we were not, so… It gives us good knowledge that the car is great, of course. I think we’ve both been driving well this weekend, and we knew the pressure was on, from ourselves. So we’ve both performed well. We’ve both got everything out of the car.
“But this is a long race, and many things can happen. So we’re definitely not going to get ahead of ourselves. We know we have a little bit of a gap in terms of positions. We’re in a much more fortunate position than what Ferrari are. [Sainz] is going to be putting up a good fight for his final race with Ferrari. You know, he’s going to want to prove his point. And I’m excited to battle if that’s the case.”
It was Max Verstappen who was on provisional pole position after the first Q3 runs and Norris admits McLaren faced a tougher test than he’d been expecting once qualifying started.
“Quali was a bit of a struggle, honestly. We just expected, probably, to be a little bit better than what we were,” he said. “The weekend so far has been quite straightforward from our side. It just seems like everyone caught up a lot come qualifying, and we had to start pushing a lot more.
“It was a good lap. It was not the cleanest, but sometimes when you’re close enough to the edge and it’s just a little bit untidy, sometimes it’s actually quite a nice place to be. So I had a couple snaps, and I had a big snap into [Turn] 9, the high speed. I just made a mistake. That hurt me a touch, but otherwise it was a nice lap.
“I put the rest of it together pretty well. Just not an easy circuit to do. We had a bit to gain in quali, because Max was looking a little bit quicker than us through the most part of it. So I knew I had to pull something out.”