McLaren Executive Director of Racing Andrea Stella says that the team made good progress ahead of Sunday’s Canadian Grand Prix following two dry practice session on Friday.

“We managed to get in two dry sessions today at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve. This is good preparation for the race, which the forecast suggests will be dry, whereas tomorrow, the weather could be quite changeable. Aside from a small issue on Lando’s car at the end of FP1, we didn’t experience any problems today and could gather quite a lot of information to inform our car set-up on this very bumpy circuit. Coming here for the first time since 2019, we also generated a lot of tyre data, which will be useful in planning a strategy for what looks like being a very interesting race.

“As has been the case for the last few races, the midfield once again looks very competitive. We’ll do our learning overnight and come back tomorrow to do our best to get into Q3, giving ourselves the best chance to score good points on Sunday.”

Daniel Ricciardo was in the tip ten in both sessions and completed 60 laps during the day and speaking following the action he said:

“I’ve definitely missed this track after not coming here for a few years. It’s so much fun. I’ve just enjoyed it. Enjoyed driving. It’s awesome – one of the best for sure in my opinion. I think we got into the groove pretty quickly and we showed good signs. We’ll see what happens with the weather – I think we were quite lucky to get a dry day today, but we’ll see what happens for tomorrow. It could be completely different, but I think today was a solid start. Hopefully we can do a bit of fine-tuning and then find a little bit more speed overnight now. Overall, it was just an enjoyable Friday. So, I’m happy to be back.”

Lando Norris described his day as tough but positive and speaking after completing 47 laps he said:

Tough day. I’d say positive, because we got through a lot of what we wanted to, but not everything. We had a couple of issues, so I didn’t get as much running as what I wanted to. We’re a little bit on the back foot with a couple of things, especially in the long run. Apart from that, the car’s in a reasonable place. We’ve definitely got some work to do with some much quicker cars ahead. But, apart from that, positive, and we’ll continue to improve into tomorrow.”

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