Lando Norris wanted McLaren to have a bigger performance gap to the rest of the field on Friday at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, but says he made progress with his own personal confidence level,
The championship leader came into this weekend’s race in Jeddah off the back of a third place in Bahrain where he felt he struggled to extract performance out of his McLaren in qualifying. Norris was characteristically hard on himself a week ago, but says he had lots of areas he wanted to focus on with his own driving in Saudi Arabia and felt it was paying off after topping the times in FP2.
“I think it was a pretty decent first day,” Norris said. “It always feels chaotic around here because it’s so fast. A lot of walls, a lot of near misses. But I think today has really been a day about working on my driving, working on myself more than probably trying to work on the car.
“I’ve been getting more confident, so a good start to the weekend — productive. I gained confidence, gaining feeling, so from what I wanted to achieve today it is on the right track.
“I would say we feel confident, but the others are not far behind. I was hoping for a bigger gap than what we had today. We know we are fast and have a great car, but certainly not as comfortable as what we would like. Nothing more than that, we will keep our heads down and focused on what we can do.”
Norris was joined at the top of the timing screens by teammate Oscar Piastri, who was 0.163s adrift and believes he knows where he needs to improve ahead of qualifying.
“It was a decent day,” Piastri said. “I think the pace has been good; I’ve felt reasonably comfortable. There are a few corners where I need to do a better job tomorrow but all in all it’s felt like a good day.”
Although it was Max Verstappen who was closest to McLaren in the FP2 classification, Charles Leclerc did not get a clean soft-tire run in, and believes he might be able to challenge come qualifying on Saturday.
“Obviously, it’s a very challenging track where confidence needs to be very high in order to perform at your best,” Leclerc said. “I think we changed the car a lot. But it was a very positive day because I’ve learned a lot from it. And I think once we put everything in the right window, there should be a bit more performance coming out of the car.
“McLaren seems to be very strong once again, and a lot stronger than us. But again, never say never. If we put everything together, I think everything is possible.
“I think we’ve done a good job by exploring different options and it’s pretty clear in my head what I want to do for tomorrow. So we are going to go in that direction and I hope that it will pay off once we get to qualifying.”
