Lando Norris backs himself despite recent struggles: “I feel like I’m the best”

Lando Norris still believes he’s “the best at the minute” despite his recent F1 qualifying struggles.

Norris lost the lead of the 2025 F1 drivers’ championship after his fourth-place finish at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.

The McLaren driver’s chances of victory were ruined by a crash at the start of Q3.

This mistake came after an error-strewn Bahrain Grand Prix, where Norris finished third.

Norris could only qualify sixth after a disastrous qualifying session.

He then received a five-second time penalty for misjudging his grid position, while his race craft against Charles Leclerc was unimpressive.

Norris remains confident in his own abilities, however.

“I’m not surprised because of all the mistakes I’ve made over the last few Saturdays,” Norris said after losing the championship lead.

“My Sundays, I think I’m pretty happy with – they’ve been pretty strong. All of my Sundays, the pace has been good.

“I have the confidence that the pace is there, and I feel like I’m the best at the minute, but I make my life too tough on Saturday.

“I’m making myself work for it; it makes my Sundays a little bit more fun at times.

“I gotta work on my Saturdays, and if I can work on my Saturdays, I’m confident I can get back to where I was.”

Team Norris still playing the team game

Despite his main rival for the championship behind his teammate, Norris’ side of the garage was still keen to play the team game in Saudi Arabia.

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella revealed that Norris’ engineer - Will Joseph - advised Piastri’s engineer when it came to overtaking on track

“You have given me the opportunity to tell you a story,” Stella explained. “The story is that Lando’s race engineer proactively told Oscar’s race engineer that we struggled to pass Lewis because we tried twice at Turn 27, and he passed us back into Turn 1.

“So we made sure Oscar knew that, and he give it a go directly into Turn 1. I was very proud that I didn’t need to prompt anything; I was just a spectator to an example of the great team spirit we have at McLaren.

“Well done to Will Joseph and Tom Stallard and the team, but I wanted to praise the mechanics and Charlie Hooper, who leads the operation in the garage, as we needed to change pretty much all the parts [on Norris’s car] apart from the chassis and power unit.

“There is always a bit of nervousness when you have to change so many parts and check everything, but it gave Lando the opportunity to go and score important points.”