Lando Norris has revealed he turned off a key data feed on his steering wheel in qualifying sessions to improve his performance.
The McLaren driver, who took pole position for this weekend’s Mexican Grand Prix, made the change after the Monaco Grand Prix. He turned off the display which shows how far he is away from the best lap time on his current lap.
The delta time updates frequently during the lap. However Norris felt it had become too much of a distraction.
“I’ve not had it since Monaco,” he said. “I’ve never used the delta since, in qualifying.”
“Who knows if it would have helped me or made me worse? The thing when I don’t have it is, I push no matter what — no matter how the start of the lap was, no matter how any corner was. I guess it’s because you have no reference of maybe the overall lap time, you just always try and maximise every corner to the maximum.
“Otherwise sometimes I just stare at it too much and that’s never the best thing. So it’s nice because normally when it goes well, like today, it’s a pleasant surprise to see the lap time pop up when it’s as good as this one.”
Norris’s first lap in Q3 was a 1’16.170. He gained almost six tenths of a second on his final run to claim pole position. As he hadn’t seen his progress on his delta, his final lap time came as a surprise.
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“Obviously it was an incredible lap,” he said. “I pushed the braking everywhere. I pushed the high-speed a bit more and all those things.
“But I don’t have a delta, so I didn’t know if I was up, if I was down, if it was good, bad, whatever. There were a couple of little places where I thought I messed up a touch and didn’t get the best exits, like out of [turn] six, but the rest of it felt pretty decent.
“I was happy, but I thought I’d be more like a 15.9, 15.8. I thought if I’d get ahead of Charles, I’d be pretty happy.
“So when I saw 15.5 on my dash, it put a pretty big smile on my face because it was one of those laps which was — everything just came together in terms of feeling. It was very natural and similar to my lap in Monaco.”
It was Norris’s first pole position since the Belgian Grand Prix. “It’s a good feeling because it’s been a while,” he said. “It’s not that often this year I get that feeling in this car, even with how quick it is.”
He said he will have to consult the data to see how he gained so much time on his final lap. “Like I said, I just pushed the braking in a few little places a bit more, and took a couple of bits more risk in the high speed.
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“Quite often the laps I do best, I don’t really know what’s happened or how it’s happened. Like I said on the radio to Will [Joseph] and [Andrew] Jarv[is], the less I know, the better I do normally on my quali laps. So it was one of them.
“But six tenths, I was surprised [by]. I got a bit worried Q3 run one when Charles did a 15.9. I was like, ‘damn, that’s a pretty impressive lap’. So, like I said, it was nice when I saw 15.5.”
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