Lando Norris has revealed why his Formula One race engineer made a rare intervention on the team radio ahead of his pole lap for the United States Grand Prix.

Norris took his sixth pole of 2024 at the Circuit of the Americas after narrowly beating title rival Max Verstappen in the Q3 shootout after the first of two scheduled rounds.

A late yellow flag for George Russell's crashed Mercedes prevented anyone else from completing another lap and denied Verstappen and Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz the chance to snatch pole from the McLaren driver.

Norris acknowledged his luck and set what he considered to be the best lap of his career on a weekend where McLaren was not as competitive as hoped.

He also admitted he wasn't at all confident about the car going into the shootout for pole, prompting his race engineer Will Joseph to deliver a rare message of encouragement as his driver took to the track dared.

In a message picked up by World Feed, Joseph told Norris to “trust the car” as the “lap time was coming,” while also giving him a technical reminder of his driving.

“It’s very rare,” Norris said. “He knows I don’t normally like things like that. That’s just because I said after Q2 that I had no confidence in the car at all.”

“I was wavering all over the place and at that point I just didn't have the confidence to do a good lap. And I had trouble in Turn 1, had trouble in Turn 12. But we were there or about there.”

“It was more about, 'Let's put in a good lap and be there.' So that’s what I did.”

“Whether or not what I did because of Will's comments, I would probably say no, otherwise I would be boosting his ego too much… But I probably needed it a little bit just because I was having major problems with the car and us.” were a bit off this weekend. A little kick never hurts.

Lando Norris, McLaren F1 Team, Will Joseph, race engineer, McLaren F1 Team, at the start

Photo by: Alastair Staley / Motorsport Images

Team leader Andrea Stella explained that Joseph's message came from Norris' performance engineer and must have been reassuring at the time.

“We hear Will because Will is the one talking to the driver, but in this case Will was actually conveying the message that Andrew Jarvis, the performance engineer, had conveyed to him,” Stella said.

“The driver, the race engineer, the performance engineer and a few others work very, very closely together to develop a language with quick references that can be learned quickly, even when preparing a qualifying lap.”

“They contain content that is technical, related to driving and sometimes even calming, and this message brought those three elements together in a single message because it was about how you approach driving.”

“It was reassuring because we knew that the car will perform if you don't overdo what you want to achieve. And it is technical because it is also related to some of the settings of the car that we adjusted from the sprint to qualifying.”