Lando Norris expresses major surprise at shock Max Verstappen result

Lando Norris has expressed his surprise at Max Verstappen and Red Bull being strong enough to snatch a surprise Italian Grand Prix pole. 

Verstappen set the fastest lap in F1 history to grab pole at Monza, breaking Lewis Hamilton's 2020 record, denying Norris a second successive Italian pole by 0.078s. 

It comes 12 months after Verstappen branded his Red Bull as a "monster" and "undriveable" at the circuit, with the world champion also breaking Sebastian Vettel's tally of 44 poles for the team with his 45th.

Analysing the situation with Verstappen, Norris admitted McLaren slightly underestimated the threat from Verstappen and Red Bull.

"I definitely want to expect that, Everyone knows that our race pace is probably a bigger strength than our quali pace," Norris told media, including RacingNews365, when questioned if he could keep Verstappen in sight if the Dutchman leads early on.

"We’ve proven that many times. But they’ve improved a lot from last year. 

"I think coming into the weekend, we probably didn’t expect the Red Bull to be quite as good, but as soon as we did the first few runs, it was clear that they made some good steps compared to last season. 

"So we’ll see. His race pace was good on Friday. It wasn’t too dissimilar to ours. So time will tell."

As for his own qualifying, Norris was quite critical, and said he lacked rhythm throughout the session, which included a brief Q2 exit scare.

"I think us as a team since FP1 already, we found that we were not quite in as good of a rhythm and had the pace advantage that we’ve had the past few weekends," he said.

"I was hitting every kerb possible that I don’t want to hit and just locking up when I shouldn’t lock up, so just not quite in the rhythm. 

"It’s not that I’ve not been in the rhythm this weekend. I’ve felt like I’ve done some reasonable laps so far this weekend and I felt like I had some good strengths here and there, but just couldn’t click back into it come quali, until the final lap. 

"But that’s also the only lap that I need to do it, so I’m happy that I did it in the end."