Breaking Down Lando Norris's Close Fight for P2 at the 2024 Japanese GP Quali

P3 is good, but how far from P2?

Lando Norris showed McLaren's potential during the F1 MSC Cruises Japanese Grand Prix 2024 qualifying on March 6th. Lando took 3rd place on the grid, which helped him secure the 5th place in the race and therefore another 10 points for himself and his team. Despite this, Norris was really close to start in 2nd place, with just 0.226s separating him from Sergio Pérez.

Given this exciting qualifying, I've put together two charts where we can compare the fastest lap of Q3 for each of the drivers. One of the graphs contains each driver's telemetry, including the gap between the drivers, speed, acceleration and braking data. The other graph shows the race track, where the color indicates the driver who dominated in each section.

We can see by the charts that during the sector 1, both drivers were in an even contest for the best lap, but from sector 2 onwards Pérez began to increase his lead. The dominance graph shows that between turn 9 and 16, the Red Bull driver dominated practically the whole area. This gap ended up reaching around 0.300s.

At the last chicane before the finish line, turns 16 and 17, McLaren smiled at their driver's good performance, overtaking Pérez laptime. But this wasn't enough, as the Red Bull driver ended up making a more precise exit, regaining his 2nd place.

With this data we can see that McLaren and its drivers are making remarkable progress with their cars. Could they surprise us even more over the course of the season?