Lando Norris explains critical F1 balancing act after recent struggles

Lando Norris has explained the critical F1 balancing act of judging when to push to the absolute limit, something which saw him make a costly error in the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.

Norris crashed in the final part of qualifying at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit after a small amount of understeer saw him run wide, with the steering correct having put the Briton in the barrier. 

It was caused by pushing to the absolute limit, something which the majority of the grid is being forced to do due to the current competitive nature of the pinnacle of motorsport. 

For Norris, who is fighting for his first F1 drivers' title, the smallest mistake can result in losing places on the grid, even when the error does not result in an accident.

When discussing on The Race podcast the difficulties of judging when to push to the absolute limit, Norris said: "Especially when you're going up against Max [Verstappen], when you're going up against Oscar [Piastri], when you're going up against George [Russell], Charles [Leclerc]. 

"These are all guys which are trying to do a similar thing, and you can't afford to leave a hundredth, two hundredths, three hundredths [of a second] on the table. So you're having to push it to that limit. 

"And when you want to be able to push it to the limit, you got to feel every step of the way. You got to feel you're on the limit of the braking, the turn in phase, the cornering phase and the exit. 

"And as soon as you just have a little bit of a mismatch, and things aren't reacting as you think they should, and you're not able to kind of predict the understeer, or predict the oversteer. 

"You're having to think, and as soon as you have to consciously think, you're losing hundredths of a second or thousandths of a second. And that's just enough to make me happy and not happy." 

Norris' mistakes

The McLaren driver has not felt comfortable in the MCL39 this season which has resulted in mistakes being made at most grands prix. 

He enters this weekend's Miami Grand Prix 10 points adrift of team-mate Oscar Piastri, with precision being needed to defeat the Australian who had been driving flawlessly.

Due to the fight for pole position often being decided by just thousandths of a second, being as accurate as possible has become essential. As explained by Norris, this has been difficult for him this year due to his issues with the car.

Norris continued: "So the harder it gets, the more precision you need, the more precision you need, the more feel and on top of the car you got to feel, and that's an area I felt like I was very good at the end of last season and really understood, and I'm not able to be as on it as I was at the end of last year.

"And therefore I paid the price in either some bigger mistakes or some lock ups or different things. I'm not able to be as precise as what I need to be, and that's costing me.

"But it's not like I don't know how or why, necessarily. I think we understand some of the reasoning, but we don't get many opportunities just to go out and try different things."