Lando Norris has admitted that the McLaren Formula 1 team is on the “back foot” at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix amid struggles with car balance during practice.
McLaren began the latest campaign with a double points score in Bahrain but is expected to go stronger at the Jeddah circuit with its plethora of high-speed sweeps.
However, Norris was situated outside the top 10 in 12th place in the sole practice hour run in representative twilight conditions, 0.931s down on the benchmark pace.
The Briton conceded that he encountered trouble with several of the 27 corners across the 3.836-mile track as a result of not striking the ideal set-up with his MCL38.
Asked about his preparations for the race weekend ahead, Norris said: “So, so. Some things I was reasonably happy with, some things not so much.
“Just certain corners that I’m just struggling to get a nice, a good balance with. Especially around here, you want to be able to feel comfortable and be able to push all the way up to the walls and things like that. Yeah, not a few corners. Too many that I’m not feeling comfortable just yet, so a bit of work to do on some of them.”
Norris suspects McLaren’s standing in the pecking order will remain identical to the last round in Bahrain and is concerned it is lagging behind its rivals at the sharp end.
Questioned on where the Woking-based squad’s battle is this weekend, Norris stated he had “no idea” and that “there’s no point guessing” until qualifying commences.
“Around where we were last week,” he continued. “Some other teams behind seem like they’ve already caught up and not caught up.
“No one’s really changed that much on the cars. Just different track and therefore different conditions and cars working differently.
“So yeah, like I said, it’s a different track and therefore you’re going to see different teams performing in a different way.
“Cars in a very different set-up window here comparing to what they were in Bahrain. So similar places [to] us and the car is relatively quick.
“Maybe we’re on the back foot comparing to the rest of the teams in terms of pace, the top four teams. But we’ll see if we can change that for us.”
But despite his dissatisfaction with the car, Norris still believes that McLaren has a “reasonable” baseline to build upon as it endeavours to improve overnight.
“But I think it’s a reasonable place to start. I feel like it’s very close between a lot of people,” he continued.
“The minute the order looks a little bit different to what we had in Bahrain, but I think we started the weekend well.”
Oscar Piastri propped up two places higher than his team-mate on the timesheets; however, he concurred with Norris’ view that McLaren had sizeable time to unlock.
“Yeah, a bit of a tricky day to be honest,” Piastri assessed. “We’ve looked good at certain points, we’ve looked not so good at certain points, so a little bit difficult to get a read on where we sit, but definitely we have some improvements to try and make tomorrow, so yeah, we’ll see what we can do.
“It looks pretty tight and pretty mixed in the middle there. So yeah, we’ll see how we can do.”
Piastri proclaimed that Aston Martin “looks quick” with Fernando Alonso’s pacesetting FP2 time but highlighted that the entire grid remains close on single-lap pace.
“It’s hard to know. Honestly, we could be right up the front. We could be P10 where we are. It’s just very hard to know,” the Australian added.
“So, expecting another close battle tomorrow in qualifying. Hopefully we can be more towards the front than where we are now.”
