{"id":24771,"date":"2025-07-27T00:32:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-27T00:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/24771\/"},"modified":"2025-07-27T00:32:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-27T00:32:09","slug":"lando-norris-shuts-down-oscar-piastri-performance-gap-concerns-everyone-was-pretty-worried","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/24771\/","title":{"rendered":"Lando Norris shuts down Oscar Piastri performance gap concerns: “Everyone was pretty worried”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lando Norris<\/a> claimed that people overreacted to the gap between him and his\u00a0McLaren<\/a> team-mate Oscar Piastri<\/a> after sprint qualifying at the Belgian Grand Prix weekend, but insisted “it was nothing to worry about” after he took pole position for Sunday’s race.<\/p>\n

The McLaren driver secured pole position with a time of 1:40.562. With a gap of just 0.085 seconds, Piastri will line up beside him. Rounding out the top four is\u00a0Charles Leclerc<\/a> in third and Max Verstappen<\/a> in fourth.<\/p>\n

“It was a decent lap, so happy,” Norris explained to Nico Rosberg<\/a> during a post-qualifying interview. “Everyone was pretty worried after yesterday. I wasn’t even that far off, it was just a couple of little issues that we had.<\/p>\n

“So I was confident after yesterday and confident coming into today so it was nice to see I could get back to the top. Three tenths is just slipstream and not being first out of the pitlane, so it was nothing to worry about. But people like to make a lot of things up, but I felt good.<\/p>\n

“The car has been flying all weekend, Oscar has been doing a good job all weekend, so we are pushing each other a lot.”<\/p>\n

Rain is expected at the\u00a0Spa-Francorchamps race as the lights go out at 3pm.<\/p>\n

“I prefer it to stay dry, honestly,” Norris admitted. “Even for the fans – I think it’s rained here for the last 10 years or something, so it would be nice to have a dry Sunday.<\/p>\n

\"Lando <\/p>\n

Lando Norris, McLaren<\/p>\n

Photo by: Sam Bagnall \/ Sutton Images via Getty Images<\/p>\n

“But I don’t mind whether it’s dry or rain or somewhere in the middle, it’s normal here and I look forward to a fun race.”<\/p>\n

Piastri started the sprint race from pole position, but lost the lead to Verstappen at Turn 5. The Australian driver admitted that he had been aiming to qualify for the grand prix in P2 after the sprint race, but was still disappointed.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter the Sprint, I was aiming for P2,” he explained to Rosberg. “I don\u2019t know what the weather\u2019s going to hold tomorrow, I think it\u2019s going to be quite different. We\u2019ll wait and see what we get, but we\u2019ll try to have a good race.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reacting to qualifying as a whole, he said: \u201cA bit disappointing. The second lap was coming together really well, and I just made a little mistake into [Turn] 14 and lost a lot of time.<\/p>\n

\u201cDisappointed. I felt like the car was very good again, but it\u2019s fine margins out there. It\u2019s obviously not a bad place to be starting but there was more in it, which is always disappointing.”<\/p>\n

In this article<\/p>\n

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Subscribe to news alerts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lando Norris claimed that people overreacted to the gap between him and his\u00a0McLaren team-mate Oscar Piastri after sprint…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24772,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,814,19752,813,1737,913,806,805,803,804,1510,85,1511],"class_list":["post-24771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-belgian-gp","tag-f1-belgian-grand-prix-2025","tag-formula-1","tag-lando-norris","tag-mclaren","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-nosyndicate","tag-sports","tag-trendingteam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24771\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}