McLaren were jumping for joy as Lando Norris and Carlos Sainz both claimed top-six starting places for the French Grand Prix.
In what is the best qualifying result for the team since 2016, the promise of practice came good with the British team also leading the midfield pack.
Highlighting how strong the team were, Norris finished Q3 just 0.009s behind Max Verstappen’s Red Bull and revealed afterwards that could have easily been found.
“Coming into qualifying after yesterday and FP3, things were looking pretty good,” the Briton summarised.
“It got a lot closer than it was yesterday, but we were expecting that and weren’t worried it was still going to be very close.
“We made a couple of tweaks before quali, which I think helped. We did what we needed to do and I managed to do a decent lap,” Norris stated.
“I messed up the last corner, getting a bit eager and overshot a little bit. Apart from that, it’s obviously a good result but tomorrow’s the long one. Big thanks to the team.”
As for Sainz, he explained how McLaren’s performance was covering a trickier weekend for the Spaniard.
“I would say it’s been a bit of a tough weekend, even if it doesn’t look like it,” he claimed.
“I was trying a lot of experimental things yesterday and that probably made me be a bit on the back foot for today.
“I was not fully comfortable with the car, but I still managed to more-or-less recover and feel better today.
“We put in some good laps in quali to reach P6 in front of our rivals and making it to Q3 with the medium tyre gives us a good fighting chance for the race. Now we have to finish the job tomorrow!”
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That feeling of a job half done is one that the Woking outfit was keen to portray as they look to maintain fourth place in the constructors’ from a resurgent Renault.
“Congratulations to everyone here at the track and back home at the factory,” said team boss Andreas Seidl. “It’s McLaren’s best quali result for quite some time.
“But we’re not getting over-excited with this result, we’ll get our heads down and stay fully focussed. Points only get distributed tomorrow.”
