Lando Norris reveals a secret trick he's used in qualifying after securing a dominant pole position for McLaren in the F1 Mexican GP

Lando Norris has revealed that he's removed the lap time delta tracker from his steering wheel, and as a result, he ends up focusing more on the lap and less on how he's doing while executing it. The British driver has shown remarkable resolve and continued to take steps towards the front ever since his DNF in Zandvoort.

In the F1 Dutch GP, the driver suffered a PU failure, and that dropped him further behind his teammate in the championship battle. Since then, Norris has kept pegging away at Piastri's lead, and even though Max Verstappen has been in the limelight with the eye-catching performances, the Brit has not finished behind his teammate in a race ever since.

Coming to the F1 Mexican GP, Lando Norris has been on song and in a league of his own. In Q3, he ended up securing pole position by close to three tenths over Charles Leclerc and, compared to everyone else, was just unstoppable.

Talking to the media afterwards, the driver revealed a key trick that he has employed that helps him focus just on the lap he's doing. Unlike most drivers on the grid, Lando Norris' steering wheel doesn't show the lap time delta compared to the previous lap, and the British driver has removed it to prevent any distraction from the current lap. Talking about how he has not had that in place since Monaco, the driver said,

“I've not had it since Monaco, and I've never used the delta since in qualifying. Who knows if it would have helped me or made me worse. I think 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."

He added,

“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. It's just 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.”

Lando Norris feels this approach is better

Early in the year, Lando Norris was susceptible to errors on his final push laps in qualifying. He would try too much on that final lap and hence make errors. Talking about his step to remove the display, the British driver feels that the less information he has, the more it helps him. He said,

“Quite often the laps that I don't really know what's happened, or how it's happened, are the laps I do the best. Like I said on the radio to Will [Joseph, race engineer] and Jarv [Andrew Jarvis, performance engineer] - the less I know, the better I do normally on my quali laps. So it was one of them.”

Lando Norris starts the race on pole position for the F1 Mexican GP and would be hoping to keep the lead into the first turn on a track that's hard to overtake.

Edited by Charanjot Singh Kohli