2023 Italian Grand Prix – qualifying “Tough day but I think we did the maximum"

Autodromo Nazionale Monza, Saturday, 2 September

Hear from McLaren Formula 1 drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, and Team Principal Andrea Stella after qualifying for the Italian Grand Prix.

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FP3 1m22.515s (+1.603s)  24 laps 17th 
 Q1  1m21.995s (Hard)   9th
 Q2  1m21.581s (Medium)   10th
 Q3 1m21.979s (Soft)   9th

"Not my best qualifying, but not a bad day. Struggled a little bit to find the last couple of things on the final lap. Probably a little bit too close to the car ahead. That compromised me maybe a little bit more than I was hoping for but yep, other than that I think it was pretty much as good as we were going to get between Oscar and myself. Oscar did a good job. Tough day but I think we did the maximum."

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FP3 1m22.302s (+1.390s)  17 laps 14th 
 Q1  1m22.106s (Hard)   11th
 Q2  1m21.527s (Medium)   8th
 Q3 1m20.785s (Soft)   7th

"Not a bad result. I felt like I did a pretty decent lap at the end there and there wasn’t too much more left in it. I’m happy with what I did. Of course, I would like to be a bit more competitive but I think that’s about where we expected to be. We’ll do some work tonight to prepare for the race and see what we can do tomorrow."

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“As usual, qualifying in Monza is intense, with cars trying to find the right position on track. I have to praise the team, as we operated well in these conditions. In terms of performance, today we didn't have enough speed to compete for the top rows of the grid. However, we are still happy that we have two cars in Q3, thanks to the good work of the team and the drivers. We now look forward to tomorrow. It will be challenging with the tyres in hot conditions, but we will try to extract the most out of it and score good points."

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