Interestingly, given he defended the new rules at testing in Bahrain last month, Norris now appears to be of the same opinion as Verstappen. That they are awful.
“The problem is you have to look at the steering wheel every three seconds to see what’s going to happen, otherwise you’re going to end up off the track,” the world champion said, adding that was the reason he had not seen Antonelli’s cooling fan. “We’ve come from the best cars ever made in Formula One, and the nicest to drive, to probably the worst. It sucks, but you have to live with it and just maximise what you get given.”
After Norris came the second Ferrari of Lewis Hamilton, who was the last driver to get within a second of Russell. Hamilton was actually quite upbeat afterwards, saying he had felt “solid” all weekend until Q2 when some energy deployment issues threw them. But he admitted Mercedes were in another league, accusing the Brackley team of sandbagging all weekend, and of having “two tenths or more” of power through every sector.
“What’s clear is that they [Mercedes] didn’t show the engine power through any of the practice,” Hamilton said. “They’ve obviously done a really solid job with their engine, which we have as well… I want to understand why there was two tenths or more just through power per sector. If it is a compression thing I want to understand why the FIA haven’t done anything and what’s being done to rectify it, but if it’s not and it’s just pure power, then we just have to do a better job.”
More Aston Martin woes
British rookie driver Arvid Lindblad deserves a special mention for making it into Q3 in his first qualifying session. The 18-year-old will start ninth on Sunday.
At the other end of the field, Aston Martin’s Lance Stroll did not even make it to qualifying after yet more Honda power unit issues. But team-mate Fernando Alonso was comfortably quicker than both Cadillac drivers who were around four seconds off the pace.
It might as well be light years. The way Toto Wolff hugged everyone on the Mercedes pit wall, you could see what this result meant for Mercedes. They appear to have aced the new engine regulations, just as they did in 2014.
“It was a great day, we knew there was a lot of potential in the car but until you get to the first Saturday of this season you never know,” Russell admitted. We know now.