Parc Ferme Interviews - Conducted by James Hinchcliffe.

Lando, congratulations on the pole position. Great final lap - first two sectors - big moment coming out of 14 on the last lap there. Were you worried you'd given away too much time, or did you think you still had it?
Lando Norris: Boy, it was stressful. Stressful as hell. I mean, I didn't know no one else was going to get a lap after me, so I knew I felt like the first few sectors were good. It's so slippery out there. As soon as you hit the kerb a little bit wrong like I did, you snap one way, you lose the car the other way, close to hitting the wall. But good enough. Good enough for P1 today. So, yeah, not the nicest of conditions, but I'm happy it stopped raining and we could get a good qualifying on.

Lando, it's been a tough weekend because it seems like no two sessions have been the same conditions-wise. Worst one being saved for qualifying. So how hard is it for you to get a grip on the car, on the track, when no two sessions seem to be the same?
LN: I mean, you need a good car to do it, first of all. So, the team did a good job. To be honest, I was having a little nap before quali, and I was expecting it to be dry. And I woke up and I saw it was raining, and I thought, 'oh crap, this is not going to go well'. But, yeah, it's just - no one's driven around here in the rain before. It's difficult to know what to expect. And after Q1, it was pretty - like every corner, you felt like you could crash and it could easily be over. So, one step at a time. Q1, Q2, Q3 - all tough. So, more rewarding a day like this because it was a tricky one?

Alright, we'll come back to you in a sec. Max, we'll go to you. P2 for tomorrow. Difficult conditions out there. But, Max, you seem to love driving in these mixed conditions, these difficult conditions. Was it hard out there, or were you having too much fun to worry about how tough it was?
Max Verstappen: It was really, really slippery out there. It's already slippery in the dry but in the wet - yeah, it's not fun, I can tell you that. I mean, I like to drive in the wet. This felt more like driving on ice, so it took a long time to get the tyres to work a little bit. I do feel that maybe we were a little bit more competitive on the extreme tyre, but the track is improving, so you have to move on to the inter. And I struggled a lot just to have any kind of grip. And for the final lap, you risk a little bit more, but it was still, of course, by far not enough to fight for first. But still, to be on the front row, I think is good for us. The lap felt alright. It's just super difficult out there to get all the braking zones right and be on the limit of the tyres as well. But we did it. So, excited for tomorrow. I hope the inside is okay in terms of grip. But, yeah, we'll see.

Now go back to Q1, when it was as wet as it was for the whole session. We see gapping a lot in Formula 1 qualifying to try to get some clean air, but it looked like gapping was necessary for visibility. How tough was the visibility at the start of this qualifying?
MV: Yeah, the visibility was also very tough. With these cars as well, with the ground effect, there's a lot of wake that gets kicked up from the floor. So when it rains, there's a lot of water and spray, and that's why you always want at least, like, eight seconds. And I know it's a lot but otherwise, you don't really see what's happening in front of you.

Alright. Well, you got it done. P2 tomorrow. Good luck for that. Congratulations. Carlos Sainz. How about that? P3 - big cheer from the crowd here. Look, we knew that this was a track Williams could potentially be quick at. Were you expecting to have this kind of pace in the wet, though?
Carlos Sainz: I mean, I'm always optimistic. You know, a dream is for free and I always try and think about myself doing well. This track maybe suited our car in the dry, and in the wet in FP3, we didn't look very promising, but we did a few changes to the car that I think helped in the wet, and that allowed me to - from the first lap of Q1, every time I was finishing the lap, I was P1, P1, P1. On Ex-Wet, I was really, really quick. On Inters, I knew the others maybe would catch up a bit. But, yeah, happy with P3.

So, racing in Las Vegas, it's such a cool scene, such a cool vibe. You got a lot of fans here up in the stands. Just what's it like coming back here every year? I know you like racing here. What do you want to say to the fans?
CS: Yeah, a bit like in Austin - massive cheer from the US fans for me every time. I don't know how to thank them, because every time I come to the US, I feel massive support from everyone. So, yeah, thanks a lot, truly. I think the US fans love a bit of an underdog, no? An underdog fight, and I think they see myself with Williams as an underdog but also as a coming project. We're becoming stronger every race, every lap that we do together, and it's great to see people behind us supporting us. And, yeah, would have loved to give them pole today, because that would have been a massive cheer then. But we were just not quite there.

Well, you found the podium once already this year. Let's see if we do it again tomorrow. Best of luck.
CS: Thank you.

Lando, let's go back to you real quick. We talked about how no two sessions have been the same. The race is probably going to be different again. Hopefully it's dry. Is there anything that you've learned this weekend that you can apply to tomorrow, or is it sort of just shooting from the hip?
LN: Shoot from the hip. Yeah. I've never said that before in my life, but - I mean, the pace has been good all weekend. I think it was going to be good in the dry. I honestly didn't expect to be as good as I was then in the wet. So very happy with that. But there are a lot of unknowns tomorrow. No one's really done much high-fuel running. No one's really done more than, like, 10-lap stints. So I'm sure it's going to be an interesting race - especially, you know, with Max up there, with Carlos as well. Nice to see him up in the top three. So hopefully we can have a good race tomorrow, and everyone can enjoy it.

Press Conference

Many congratulations, Lando. What a session. What a final lap. Can you start by describing how tough it was out there in those conditions?
LN: Pretty nasty. Probably some of the worst-not like the worst conditions, you know, it's been wetter. It's just, it feels like you may as well have been out on slicks, to be honest. It was so slippery, difficult. The amount of wheelspin you have in places, how easy it was to lock tyres, the white lines, the yellow lines-just everything was pretty tough. So, yeah, even more satisfied with the end result because of how tricky it was out there today. But some good laps just to keep it controlled, keep it in a good manner through Q1, through Q2, and obviously risk a little bit more into Q3, and it paid off. So, very happy.

In which part of the track did you have to be most cautious?
LN: In 1, 2, 3... I mean, the braking zones are all quite tricky. Obviously, it's a long lap, and then you get to quite a very difficult last corner-Turn 14-big stop, easy to lock the front tyre. It's easy to just want to brake five metres later, ten metres later. And then you've got the kerbs. A lot of people crashed there and made mistakes, spun. I was close to doing it on my final lap. There were just even bits around the track that were quite weird-some bits felt actually OK, some bits felt just shockingly slippery and difficult to manage, to control the car, the wheelspin-everything. So just, yeah, random bits. But the big braking zone, especially the final corner on a quali lap, is the most daunting, I would say.

With the track conditions improving all the time in Q3, just how difficult was it to get the timing of your runs right?
LN: It was tricky, especially because there's always a risk of yellow flags and also red flags here. I'm surprised there wasn't more, in a way, because of the difficulty today. But we weren't out near the front, so I was pretty happy to wait a little bit longer down the end of the pit lane and just have some cleaner air, stay out of the way of everyone else behind, try and avoid as much as possible the yellow flags and take that risk element out of it and just let me put some laps in, build the confidence in the car. Of course, I was, I think, the only one who got one more lap at the end of the run, and that worked out perfectly. I think we were still pretty good before, and then to get the timing of-I think we did like push-push, push-cool-push or something at the end. So, yeah, just making sure the battery was ready, making sure the tyres were in good condition. And obviously, having that chance to go one more lap than everyone else worked out perfectly. Never easy on a day like today, but everything worked well.

Let's throw it forward now to the Grand Prix tomorrow. The forecast is for a dry race. In terms of performance, where does the car feel better this year than it did last year in Las Vegas?
LN: Just everywhere in Las Vegas. Every corner, every straight, every bump. I proved myself wrong in terms of, you know, the expectation was pretty low coming into this weekend, even on Wednesday in the press conference. I wasn't expecting too much. But they were definitely not high. So for us to show some good performance yesterday, this morning as well in practice before some of the issues we had-I already felt pretty good and quite confident that if it was going to be a dry quali, we would be challenging. It would be tight, but we could be challenging for pole. So when I woke up from my nap before quali, I wasn't too happy seeing it was raining, because it's always just a bit more chaos. And, yeah, never the most confident over the course of this year-especially the beginning-with these conditions, with the car. It can be quite tricky at times. But from the first lap I actually felt pretty good in the car, and that turned into a good result.

Check out our Saturday gallery from Las Vegas here.