McLaren hopeful: 'We still have to make a step forward'

McLaren experienced a rough start to the race weekend in Brazil on Friday. Indeed, the British formation saw Lando Norris and Daniel Ricciardo both fail to finish in the top ten in the first free practice session. While Norris took 15th place, the Australian actually finished last.

Nevertheless, it does not cause McLaren to panic, Andreas Seidl stressed in conversation with Sky Sports. According to the formation's team boss, McLaren took enough data from the session that could be of values for qualifying ahead later in the day.

"Not the most interesting timesheets, but it was important to focus on our programme and set up work on the hard tyres," he explained. "Then switch to the medium tyres at the end to save six sets of soft tyres for the end. Similar to what the Alpines did as well."

"We hope for a dry qualifying session to benefit from it. We still have to make a step forward after how this first session went. Still confident that we can be in this battle (with Alpine) again."

Norris fit in time for weekend

On Thursday, McLaren still decided to send Norris to the hotel because he was not feeling well. Nyck de Vries was to be the replacement when Norris could not appear on the grid on Friday, but the Dutchman was eventually told that the Briton had recovered in time.