McLaren saw mixed results from Friday practice sessions for the 2026 F1 Mexico City GP. While Lando Norris came in 2nd in his only run in FP2, Oscar Piastri was 8th on the timesheets for FP1 and 10th in FP2. Reserve driver Leonardo Fornaroli took Norris’ car for FP1 and was 17th.
Singh’s assessment: “Reasonable” early results
McLaren racing director Randy Singh was optimistic about their overall results. “I’d say it was reasonable. It’s very hard to judge with a lot of drivers having missed FP1 as well. It’s very tight at the front as it has been the last few races. So I’d say reasonable. And Lando’s session, we’re mostly focused on getting him up to speed so we kept the medium and the soft tyres. Moving on to the high fuel to do as much as we can. It’s difficult conditions out there, as you’ll have seen. A bit of front-locking, et cetera.”
Even with Piastri showing further down the order, Singh put it all into perspective with regard to the difficulty of the Autódromo Hermanos Rodriguez circuit. The Aussie had a massive slide in the last corner, otherwise his qualifying sim was strong as well.
“Oscar’s session was decent as well. It’s just difficult because there’s a lot of locking risk here. The tyres are not the easiest to deliver a single lap on. So I’m sure we’ll improve with Oscar. There were a couple of bits on his lap that will improve as we go into tomorrow. But yeah, it’s tricky to deliver a lap. And the key thing here is the midfield is a lot closer than it has been in recent races. So it’s just going to be a very difficult qualifying.”
Piastri: “The overall pace seems to be there”
Piastri remarked that the sessions were “difficult for sure, but I don’t think necessarily worse than what I was expecting. If anything, it was probably a little bit better than I was expecting. Everything felt okay. I think we seemed to be relatively competitive, to be honest. My soft lap in FP2 was pretty messy, but I feel like the overall pace seems to be there. Ferrari looked very, very strong, which I guess you would expect on a track like this, but I think we’ve had a pretty good day.”
“I think we are a bit more competitive. Even in my lap, I think there were a couple of very big mistakes, so I’m optimistic that if I can tidy those up, I’ll be a lot further up as well, which is a nice feeling to have. I think to try and beat Ferrari tomorrow is going to be very, very tough, it looks like. It’s very tight, I would say, through the whole field, so you’re going to have to be on top of the game.”
Despite difficulties, positive FP1 performance from Fornaroli
Fornaroli ran in his third FP1 session of the season, and on a new circuit for the 2025 Formula 2 champion, his run didn’t go 100 percent smoothly.
“I was in my consecutive run with the hard tyres. The rear tyres were a bit hot and took the inside kerb of T11 a bit more aggressively and still went on throttle on the normal way. The car didn’t like that and lost the rear. It was a scary moment but I managed to save it pretty good.
“Of course it was a new track for me and it wasn’t easy to build confidence. It was very low grip, especially at the start of the session. Then putting temperature into the tyres was very hard as well. In fact, I had a front lock-up straight away into T1 because I didn’t manage to put the right temperature into the front tyres. This of course compromised the whole soft run and performance in general. With the car as well, I think we have to recover some performance in all the area in general. But it was a very useful session. I’m really happy to be part of this team and try to give the team my feedback to develop the car the best as we can.”
Singh was pleased with the run from Fornaroli, despite the occasional misstep. “Leo did a really good job. We had a lot of tests, sort of experiments on his part to get our config right for the weekend for this circuit. He did a great job, and he has every FP1 so far, so we want to continue that preparation.”
