Lando Norris has reflected on a difficult opening day of practice at the Sakhir Grand Prix weekend, which was interrupted by a number of issues in the second session.
After setting 47 laps in FP1, Norris damaged his car after running wide at Turn 2 when he returned to the track for the final session of the day.
He was soon forced to return to the pit lane with a power unit issue that sidelined him for the remainder of the day, meaning he set just 14 laps during FP2.
“[It was] my mistake for running too wide out of Turn 2 which meant I then damaged the floor,” Norris said.
“The second one was a power unit issue that took me out for the rest of the session. So not a great day for us.”
Norris’ team-mate Carlos Sainz ended FP2 in 10th place, leading Norris to believe that the outer Bahrain track layout is not suiting McLaren’s package.
“It looks like it is one of our trickier days in terms of pace, although there are only four corners, we are quite a long way off,” he said
“We needed the testing today, we needed to do some laps. We did not get them so we are not in a great position going into qualifying. But we will work hard and try to make some improvements.
“We have some strengths in parts of the track when there’s four or five corners, some parts of it we are reasonably competitive, and some parts were just a long way off.
“So we have to understand. I think we are still running a bit more downforce than most because were slow in the straights.
“We look okay in the corners but that is because we are running more downforce. I’m not too sure.
“We have to look into it a bit more. It is not easy otherwise we would be a lot quicker than we were.
“So we just need to spend time on that data and see what is different compared to last weekend, and see if you get a bit of that feeling back.
“But it is a different track, a different weekend although does the same circuit it is a different layout. The characteristics and the needs for the car are quite different.”
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