Lando Norris predicts Monza qualifying chaos

McLaren

Norris predicts Monza qualifying chaos

McLaren driver managed to complete just five timed laps in FP2

Sam Hall

Friday 4 September 2020 17:42 Updated: 18:32

Lando Norris is concerned qualifying for the Italian Grand Prix will be a repeat of the chaos from last year despite the FIA introducing a minimum lap time.

Confined to the garage with a power unit problem for large period of FP2 at Monza, Norris looked on as drivers fought for track position ahead of the qualifying simulation runs, crawling at a snail's pace on their 'warm-up' laps.

A year ago, due to a variety of circumstances, nine of the 10 runners in Q3 failed to set a second lap time after battling in a similar fashion.

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Ahead of practice two, race director Michael Masi issued a note to teams informing them a minimum time will be set to prevent them from driving "unnecessarily slowly on an out lap or any warm-up lap."

Despite this, Norris said: “I think it’s going to be very similar to last year with a lot of cars not wanting to go first.

“I think it’s going to be exciting to watch because it’s going to be similar to last year, and we’ve already seen in Formula 3 and Formula 2, it’s a similar story.

"It’s going to be tricky to make sure you’re in the right spot because you want to slipstream because it helps a lot around here.

"But at the same time, you don’t want to be too close and have too much understeer or problems in the middle sector in the corners.

“It’s not easy. Especially in these Formula 1 cars, it’s even worse than last year, so we’ll have to wait and find out.”

On his limited running for the day, which still saw him finish third quickest behind a Mercedes one-two with a late flying lap, albeit nine-tenths of a second adrift of Lewis Hamilton, Norris commented: "I think it's a bigger problem that I didn’t do many laps in the end.

"Nothing with the high fuel, it was just five laps at the end of the session just on the low fuel but it was difficult because everyone else was doing the high fuel and the pace difference between low and high fuel is very big."

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