Lando Norris: I am happy with third place.

      McLaren drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri will occupy the second row of the starting grid in Saturday's sprint of the Canadian Grand Prix. While the reigning world champion is satisfied with his third place on the grid, his teammate is concerned about the gap to Mercedes.

      Lando Norris (3rd): "Very good result, actually a pleasant surprise. After practice, we were a bit worried since we weren't entirely confident in the car. But before the sprint qualifying, we made some adjustments, and thanks to that, the car improved. I'm happy with third place.

      Of course, my lap can't be called the best – I could have extracted more from the car. But the gaps to the leaders aren't that big, so we can say we managed to turn the situation in our favor compared to practice. I'm proud of the team, which did a great job.

      Overall, everything is not bad. Some aspects raise more questions, so we need to analyze everything, but we must consider that Canada has an atypical track. There is very low grip on the asphalt, the car bounces on the curbs, so it's hard to get a true sense of the situation and confirm the numbers we saw in the wind tunnel.

      We need to work on some aspects. I might come back to this at the next stage or in Barcelona. But otherwise, the car performed well, and I felt particularly confident on the Soft tires at the end, and that confidence was something I hadn't felt all weekend. We made a good step forward, but let's see what else we can improve on Saturday."

      Oscar Piastri (4th): "Everything went quite well, although it was a challenging day for everyone. The Mercedes drivers are very strong, and unfortunately, that's the main takeaway from today. We'll see what we can do to perform better on Saturday.

      This year our starts have been better than Ferrari's, so we are confident about that. As for Mercedes, I'm sure it's just a matter of time before they sort out their starts and become competitive in that aspect again. But until that happens, we'll try to take advantage of their difficulties."

      Andrea Stella, team principal: "I think we have a fairly reasonable gap to Mercedes, considering the significant updates they brought. We also had some new parts, and we would have liked to spend a bit more time working on the front wing, so we used the previous version in qualifying. So our car is practically the same as it was in Miami, and such a gap is encouraging.

      Of course, we would like to be on pole, but we lost three tenths, and this needs to be viewed in perspective. But, in any case, it was an encouraging session. As is often the case in sprint events, you can learn something during the sprint itself, so we'll see what steps we can take before the race."