Lando Norris reveals “mental” improvements to cut out qualifying blunders

Lando Norris has revealed that he’s been working hard over the winter to eradicate mistakes creeping into his qualifying performances.

Norris was critical of himself after a run of qualifying blunders in the second half of last season.

The British driver threw away pole twice in Qatar, was knocked out in Q1 in Mexico, and made a slight mistake on his best lap in Abu Dhabi.

Unfortunately for Norris, it was teammate Oscar Piastri who capitalised in Qatar, going on to take his first win in the sprint event.

Speaking to the media ahead of McLaren’s car launch last week, Norris shared some insight into his work over the winter.

"There have been various things already, both in terms of how I drive, how I work in extracting the performance, understanding these traits, and then putting them already to the test on the simulator, and trying to improve them.

"Sometimes it's hard to improve various things until you're actually in the car, but to the extent of what I can, even if it's mental things and trying to work on any area that I can to improve it, I would say I've done.

"It's always a different experience until you get back in the car and you're in that moment again under pressure.

"It's hard to know until the first qualifying of the season how well those things might work and what further things might need to be done to improve in those areas."

"The later you get into the regulations, the tighter it gets, it's normally what we see," he added.

"Even if it was dominated probably more than ever, it was also the tightest from first to last for the majority of the year. If you look at second or third place to the back of the grid, it's probably even less than half a second.

"I'm sure we're in for a couple of years which will be some very tight racing.

"When you don't have a perfect lap or you don't get something exactly right, at times in the past you could get away with it, whereas I think you're going to be able to get away with this less and less.

"And that requires fewer mistakes, more hard work and learning and perfection in order to achieve consistent results."