Mexico grid set: Norris leads as Leclerc and Hamilton chase, Piastri faces uphill battle

Lando Norris seized pole position for the 2025 Mexican Grand Prix on Saturday, delivering a major boost to his championship ambitions. The McLaren driver’s lap, 0.262 seconds faster than Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, positions him at the front for Sunday’s race, with championship rivals Max Verstappen and Oscar Piastri starting further back in fifth and seventh.

Teams arrived in Mexico City with set-ups tailored to the track’s 2,285m altitude, running low-downforce packages and enlarged cooling ducts to combat the thinner air. Practice sessions hinted at a closely contested qualifying, with several teams appearing capable of challenging for pole.

Norris’ first challenge on Sunday will be keeping the two Ferraris at bay during the long run to Turn 1. He was elated after taking pole. “What a lap, what a lap! Even I don’t know how I did that,” he said over the team radio. “The less I know, the better”.

Reflecting on the lap afterwards, he admitted he was pleasantly surprised by his pace, describing it as “one of those laps where you don’t really know what happened, it felt decent, but then when I crossed the line and saw a 15.5 [milliseconds], I was very pleasantly surprised.”

Leclerc’s Ferrari narrowly missed the top spot, with teammate Lewis Hamilton close behind in third, just 0.090 seconds adrift. Hamilton highlighted the team’s effort to extract maximum performance this weekend. He said the qualifying result, the first time both Ferraris were in the top three this year, reflected improved processes rather than car development: “These guys have been so quick all year and it’s an amazing feeling … the team truly deserve it, so we are just working as hard as we can and I’m super grateful to everyone in this team for continuing to push and not give up.”

George Russell will line up fourth for Mercedes, ahead of Verstappen in fifth, and Kimi Antonelli in sixth. Verstappen, who has won in Mexico before, struggled to find pace during qualifying and acknowledged the difficulty of the weekend, admitting, “I’m not really expecting to be in a battle ahead of me – they’re miles faster.”

Oscar Piastri’s challenges continued as he could only muster seventh, which would have been eighth if not for Carlos Sainz’s five-place grid penalty for last weekend’s collision in Austin. Piastri admitted uncertainty over his lack of pace: “[The car] feels OK, just no pace, which is a bit of a mystery -- it’s been more or less the same gap all weekend. We will have a look at where I was going wrong then, and I would say it was a bit frustrating.”

As for Sainz, last year’s Mexico winner, he will drop from seventh to 12th, adding intrigue to the opening laps as drivers fight through the field. Haas’ Oliver Bearman starts ninth after Sainz’s penalty, while Yuki Tsunoda begins 10th, narrowly missing a Q3 place by 0.012 seconds.

Further down, Esteban Ocon, Nico Hülkenberg, Fernando Alonso, Liam Lawson, Gabriel Bortoleto, Alex Albon, Pierre Gasly, Lance Stroll, and Franco Colapinto round out the grid, setting the stage for an intense opening stint at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, famous for its 830-metre run to Turn 1.

With Norris ahead, Leclerc and Hamilton in close pursuit, and key championship contenders starting further back, Sunday’s race, starting at 10pm SA time, promises high stakes and a potentially thrilling opening lap of the Mexican Grand Prix.