The McLaren Formula One Team had a tricky start to the Mexican Grand Prix weekend at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodríguez on Friday.
Lando Norris who ended the sessions in 15th and 12th respectively commented following the action saying:
A difficult day as we struggled with the balance and the overall grip level. I think we’ve found some positives between FP1 and FP2. We can be confident we’re going to make some improvements into tomorrow and find a bit more lap time. It’s not easy, so we’ll work hard overnight and see what we can find.”
Daniel Ricciardo was 14th and 15th respectively and speaking following the action he commented saying:
Unfortunately, we didn’t really get much done this afternoon. We had an issue in FP2, so we only completed the Hard run. These things happen, and we’ll just have to get into it tomorrow. We don’t have any time to waste so we’ll get amongst it. We’ve got a few challenges ahead but we’ll be alright. We got enough information from Lando today to be able to pick it up tomorrow.”
McLaren Executive Director of Racing Andrea Stella commented saying:
Today’s practice sessions showed us what we expected to see here in Mexico City. The altitude pushes us to tune several aspects of our set-up to cope with the cooling requirements and low downforce levels that are a feature of racing on this circuit. What we weren’t expecting was the need to curtail Daniel’s afternoon session. We stopped him early after seeing some markers in the data, related to his gearbox, that we thought prudent to explore.
“This leaves us with work to do to ensure we are competitive in qualifying and the race. It seems very tight this weekend with Ferrari and AlphaTauri in good shape – but we know what we have to do to meet our objectives over the next two days.”