Norris went second in Q3 in Losail for McLaren, which proved to be the second-fastest car through the high-speed corners behind Red Bull's dominant polesitter Max Verstappen.
But the Briton immediately realised he wouldn't start there as he had caught a slide into the Turn 10 left-hander that spat him out wide past the white line, which saw his lap time deleted.
Norris also lost his first, almost identical, Q3 time and therefore dropped all the way down to 10th on the grid for Sunday's grand prix.
Afterwards he fully owned up for his messy qualifying session, and when asked by Sky Sports F1 if his car's pace still left him encouraged for the remainder of the weekend, he replied:
"I don't think like that. I just think of the job I'm meant to do today, which is put in good laps, don't make mistakes. And that's all I did today, so not a good day for me.
"The team has done a good job; I just messed it up. I just had a correction on oversteer and went off."
The slip up briefly promoted his team-mate Oscar Piastri from fourth to third on the grid, but the Australian rookie also saw his best lap scrubbed, demoting him to sixth.
Piastri felt the slippery track was the main factor behind a total of 22 qualifying times being taken off the board for track limits violations.
"I think it's very tight and it's so easy to make mistakes, the track is very slippery, so not making things easy for us," he added.
"Obviously, it's a shame that we're a bit further back now for the main race, where the most points are, but there's definitely points up for grabs.
"We obviously get another crack at it tomorrow in qualifying and then the sprint too."
Team boss Andrea Stella acknowledged that it was "disappointing" that his drivers will start sixth and 10th instead of second and fourth. But he refused to call Sunday's race an exercise in damage limitation, confident that both his drivers are able to retake their positions at the front.
"It's a long weekend ahead of us and we don't only want to limit damage, we want to recover entirely the positions and go back to where we belong," he said.
"It's unfortunate, it's a bit disappointing, obviously, because the result doesn't reflect the potential of the car, which today was again, quite strong, which is encouraging.
"So, while it's a tough result to accept, at the same time the weekend is quite long. We have a sprint shootout, we have a sprint race, the race itself will be quite long and interesting from a tyre point of view, plenty of opportunity to recover.
"It looks like on this kind of track layout we are the second force at the moment."
