By Alan Baldwin
AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) -McLaren’s Lando Norris hailed the best pole position of his career after beating Red Bull rival and Formula One leader Max Verstappen to pole position at the U.S. Grand Prix on Saturday.
Verstappen, 54 points clear of Norris in the standings after winning the earlier sprint at Austin’s Circuit of the Americas, might have gone faster but George Russell crashed his Mercedes in the dying seconds and forced him to ease off.
Russell was unhurt and climbed out of the car.
Norris had set a storming provisional pole time of one minute 32.330 seconds with his first flying lap and Verstappen was 0.031 slower.
Red Bull’s triple world champion was looking quicker on his second run but the crash in the final sector brought out double yellow warning flags.
The pole was Norris’s sixth of the season, and second in a row, and he was delighted with it.
“It was a beautiful lap. I was not going to go much quicker than I did,” he said.
“When you do a lap and know it’s going to be tough to beat that… I put everything on the line.
“It’s what we needed to do. We have been on the backfoot pretty much the whole weekend. We haven’t had the pace of the Ferraris or Red Bulls. So I had to do something and today I did that. A cool lap and a nice way to start the race tomorrow.”
Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz and Charles Lecerc qualified third and fourth respectively.
McLaren’s Oscar Piastri and Russell will share the third row and Alpine’s Pierre Gasly and Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso qualified seventh and eighth.
Haas’s Kevin Magnussen and Red Bull’s Sergio Perez completed the top 10.
Mercedes’ seven-times world champion Lewis Hamilton, the most successful F1 driver in U.S. races and of all time, provided a major early shock by qualifying 19th.
“In the sprint we had some sort of failure from the formation lap on the front suspension. I had that throughout the sprint race. That made the balance really difficult,” said Hamilton.
“The car was a nightmare in qualifying. I should probably start in the pit lane, otherwise I won’t be going anywhere from where I am.”
New Zealander Liam Lawson was third fastest in that same opening phase, the RB driver making a statement knowing that he will be starting at the back due to a grid penalty inherited from predecessor Daniel Ricciardo.
(Reporting by Alan Baldwin, editing by Rod Nickel and Pritha Sarkar)
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