Norris: "One of our trickier Fridays"

With a 12th place for Oscar Piastri and a 14th place for teammate Lando Norris in the second free practice session, it was again not a prosperous day for McLaren. The team thus lacked pace, but also could not (yet) find the right set-up on the modified Barcelona circuit, Norris told GPblog and others afterwards.

Norris spoke about a "quite a tough day". Indeed: "It's been one of our trickier Fridays I would say, in terms of pace and setup and I think we struggled with a few different things this morning in FP1, some of which we improved a little bit and some of which I would say I'm still struggling a bit with just in terms of the handling, just putting it all together, making too many mistakes because of how I feel like I have to drive the car at the moment. I think the pace can be there, I would probably walk towards the back end of it, but you have to try to be there."

Track adjustments

So in the final sector of the track, the chicane has disappeared this season, allowing drivers to enter the long straight at a greater speed. Whether that will make much difference at the Grand Prix, according to Norris, remains to be seen on Sunday. "Find out on the race on Sunday. I've not done any racing necessarily just yet, so I did some following and like I said before, I think sometimes it feels a bit better, I think it's easier to make a mistake in the final corner, other times it felt a bit worse, so I don't have an answer just yet, it's something I'll try and figure out tomorrow."