His confidence in the car already wavering, the world championship leader, Lando Norris, now has to cope with another serious blow to his title ambitions after crashing out in qualifying for the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, while his Red Bull rival Max Verstappen claimed pole position, only one-hundredth of a second clear of Norris’s teammate Oscar Piastri.
Norris is notoriously self-critical and his costly error at the Jeddah circuit might well cause him to once more deliver a brutal self-examination. His own summation in the moments after the crash summed it up as he bluntly described himself as a “fucking idiot” over team radio.
