SPIELBERG, Austria :McLaren’s Lando Norris bounced back from his collision in Canada to take a dominant Austrian Grand Prix pole position on Saturday while championship-leading team mate and title rival Oscar Piastri qualified third.
Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc joined Norris on the front row with seven-times world champion team mate Lewis Hamilton fourth, raising the Italian team’s hopes after a difficult weekend so far.
“It’s nice to see the old me back, every now and then,” quipped Norris over the team radio after going fastest with his first effort in the top-10 shootout and then doing even better with his second.
Red Bull’s reigning champion Max Verstappen qualified only seventh at his team’s home circuit after pulling out of his final flying effort when Alpine’s Pierre Gasly spun at the last corner and briefly brought out yellow flags.
Piastri was also forced to bale but had been slower than Norris, who was fastest throughout and in final practice, in both of the first two phases.
Norris, who needs a strong result after a collision with Piastri in Canada two weeks ago, is 22 points behind the Australian in the championship after 10 of 24 races.
“I did what I planned to do and when I plan to do something and it goes right, it normally goes very, very well,” said Norris, whose pole time of one minute 03.971 seconds was 0.521 quicker than Leclerc’s lap.
“The feeling I had today was a feeling I’ve missed for quite a long time, the feeling I have behind the wheel, in the car, the understanding of where the grip is and how to exploit it. That showed, gaining performance and in lap time.”
It was the biggest gap so far this season between first and second on the grid and the pole was the Briton’s third of the campaign, after Australia and Monaco where he won both races with the fastest lap.
“Lando has been very quick all weekend and it would have been a tough challenge (to beat him) but I think we easily had enough pace in the car this weekend to be on the front row,” said Piastri.
“But we still have some opportunities tomorrow. I’m not planning on finishing third, that’s for sure.”
RED FLAG
George Russell, last year’s race winner, qualified fifth for Mercedes and kept the place after stewards gave him a warning for a pitlane breach.
Liam Lawson will line up sixth for Racing Bulls and ahead of Verstappen, who said that even without the yellow flags he would still have been “miles off pole”.
“Hopefully tomorrow we can at least be competitive with Ferrari or Mercedes,” said the four-times world champion, although he also expressed doubts about that.
Brazilian rookie Gabriel Bortoleto made it into the final phase for the first time and qualified eighth for Sauber, the future Audi factory team.
Italian rookie Kimi Antonelli was ninth fastest for Mercedes and Gasly completed the top 10.
The second phase of qualifying was red-flagged when the trackside grass at turn 10 caught fire, the latest of a series of such incidents.
The governing FIA said the fire had been caused by a car going off track, rather than by sparks from the titanium skid blocks, and carried out additional dampening of the grass before the final top-10 shootout.
Verstappen’s team mate Yuki Tsunoda and Williams’s Carlos Sainz made early exits, neither getting through the opening phase.
“There’s damage in the car, for sure. The car is undriveable… it’s pulling under braking, no load in high speed,” said Sainz, who qualified 19th with only Sauber’s Nico Hulkenberg behind.
He explained later that the team had put new brakes on the car for qualifying, as usual, but it started pulling to one side immediately.
(Writing by Alan Baldwin in London, editing by Ed Osmond, Andrew Cawthorne and Clare Fallon)
