McLaren had a promising start to their F1 Austrian GP weekend in the Friday practice sessions. Oscar Piastri was third in FP1 and climbed to second in FP2. Lando Norris only ran nine laps in FP1 due to an unspecified problem, but was still seventh on the timesheet. With the problem resolved for FP2, Norris placed third, less than a tenth of a second behind his teammate.
Cautious optimism for McLaren from F1 Austrian GP practice
Norris didn’t specify what the issue was that kept him out of most of first practice. He was encouraged by the running that he did get on Friday, however.
“From a pace point of view, we’ve had a reasonable day, and we’re a bit closer to the cars ahead, which is encouraging. This track seems to suit us as we’ve seen in the last few years, and that’s a good trend for the weekend ahead. The priority now is to build a little more confidence in the car, and if we can do that, I think we can take another step forward to the leading teams. There’s work to do, but the signs are positive and we’ll keep pushing to turn that into a stronger position ahead of tomorrow’s qualifying.”
Quicker in both sessions, Piastri was also cautiously optimistic about where McLaren stood heading into the rest of the weekend.
“I don’t know if we’re in the mix with Mercedes. I think we seem to be kind of best of the rest after them. But I think Kimi and Mercedes always find a lot of pace from Friday to Saturday. So I’m expecting them to be very, very quick tomorrow. But I think, personally, it’s been a pretty good day and I think for the team it’s been a reasonably good day as well. For FP2 especially, we got a bunch of good learning. So we just need to keep that going.”
Rotating wing staying at the garage—for now…
McLaren did make the decision to not run a new rotating rear wing design. Technical Director Neil Houldey explained that the experiment simply wasn’t ready to send to the track.
“I don’t want to go into technical detail on it, but we realised once we actuated it that actually it wasn’t doing what we needed it to, and therefore it was best not to spend time trying to make it work in that first session. It was important for us to try and get running on the car that we wanted to run for the rest of the weekend, because the intention was only to run it for a very, very short period of time anyway. Actually, we were best to focus on the car and this weekend rather than development work, and we’ll bring that wing back when we’ve learnt a little bit more and are comfortable with the design.”
“We don’t know at the moment where we are”
For the rest of the weekend, Houldey was more guarded about McLaren’s chances. He was quick to remind reporters that it’s not just Mercedes that McLaren are watching out for.
“We haven’t brought much from the last event. We’ve made some small changes. We have an optimised setup. We’ve still got some opportunities, but we saw how quick Kimi was, and I’m sure George is capable of the lap times that Kimi is. We know that Ferrari were very, very quick in Barcelona, and there’s no reason why they won’t be as fast here. Red Bull brought a big package, and we can expect them to be up there. So, actually, I think it’s at least those eight drivers that are in contention here, and we don’t know at the moment where we are. Looked good in the first, especially considering the amount of time that Lando got. He looked like he put in a great lap straight away in P2. But, yeah, the competition’s hard, and we know that they probably haven’t maximised their potential either.”
