Sainz said he used Norris’s ‘iRacing line’ on way to Mexican GP pole · RaceFans

Carlos Sainz Jnr said the unusual line he took at the end of his pole position lap was one he learned from former team mate Lando Norris.

The Ferrari driver avoided the conventional racing line as he finished his flying laps today, covering a fractionally shorter distance to the timing line.

Sainz believes Norris developed the technique in driving simulator iRacing. He said he learned it from his rival when the pair were team mates at McLaren in 2019 and 2020.

“It’s just a Lando thing that he normally likes to do,” said Sainz. “I think it’s from iRacing or something. He likes doing a short distance to the line and I said well, I lose nothing, maybe if it’s faster cutting a bit the distance, maybe it gives me a thousand or two thousandths of a second, I’m going to make sure this time I don’t leave them out there.

“I remember from our McLaren days he used to do it a lot and I was a bit puzzled.”

The Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez is not an official-licensed circuit for iRacing. However the same technique has been used by some drivers at other tracks with similar final corners.

Sainz beat Max Verstappen to pole position by two-tenths of a second, so the unusual line was not decisive. The pole winner said getting the tyre temperatures perfect had been key.

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“Tyre preparation has been a hot topic in Ferrari the last few races because we feel like in the race we’re always very strong, but we seem to lack something come qualifying. This year’s car is very good on tyres, but I think that sometimes it means that in quali you cannot maybe extract the maximum out of the tyres in the first timed lap on the soft tyres.

“I put a bit of focus on that during the three-week break and came into Austin and Mexico with a couple of things that seemed to pay off.”

Both of Sainz’s laps in Q3 were quick enough for pole position. He said the result was “very sweet.”

“It’s not normal to have such two strong laps around Mexico. There’s a lot of sliding in the lap, very difficult to put a lap together, and actually my two laps of Q3 were almost both perfect.

“I’m very happy to be on pole and to confirm the good form from Austin. In Austin already that last lap of Q3 was coming good [before he encountered yellow flags]. So I had high hopes coming into Mexico and we’ve managed to keep it up.”