McLaren downplays Friday pace at Suzuka

McLaren says its Friday pace is likely to be an outlier despite Oscar Piastri setting the fastest time during the second practice session for the Japanese Grand Prix.

Piastri and Lando Norris both ended first practice within 0.2s of the fastest times set by the Mercedes drivers, before the Australia was then quickest in the second session. Despite that, McLaren insists the overall competitive order is unchanged from the first two races and expects Mercedes and Ferrari to be clearly ahead on Saturday.

“We made the most of our opportunities today despite a challenging start,” senior director of racing Randy Singh said. “After FP1, the team did a fantastic job to manage a hydraulic issue on Lando's car and ensure we still gathered valuable data from the session.

“Seeing Oscar finish P1 is always encouraging, and it shows we are working hard to extract the maximum from the package, but we remain realistic. We don't believe the fundamental pecking order has changed since the last race.

“Our focus for this weekend is clear: maximize every session, harvest as many points as we can, and continue to learn what we need to develop the car further. The season has presented its challenges, but every race is an opportunity to improve. We are focused on our own program and executing a clean weekend to secure the best possible result.”

For Norris, the lack of running in FP2 hampered his ability to gain further knowledge after a disastrous Chinese Grand Prix in which both McLaren drivers fail to start, and he admitted it leaves him on the back foot for the rest of the weekend.

“Even FP1, all the morning … the first part of it was just aero running, so even the few laps that I did get was not that representative for me,” Norris said. “Of course I have data to look at and things, but around a track like this, you just want laps.

“I don't care what data I can look at, you just want laps under your belt to give you some confidence and good knowledge – which I got some of at the end. But, just two or three steps behind at the minute with setup, with no long running and not (having) done more than one lap at a time.

“So, a pretty terrible start to the weekend. But we've got the night to kind of reset and try and fix some things.”

Despite McLaren downplaying its performance, Mercedes' George Russell – who was fastest in FP1 – said the pace from the defending constructors’ champions caught his eye.

“McLaren were pretty fast,” Russell said. “So a little bit of a surprise, to be honest. There's still some improvements we need to do. So a bit of work to do tonight.

“I don't see why it wouldn't be genuine [pace]. I think Lando's had a disrupted day, but Oscar's looked pretty on it from from the first lap out of the box this morning. So, we'll find out come qualifying.

“We've got some more to give and things weren't quite optimized today, especially on my side with the energy management. So hopefully a little bit more to come tomorrow… There's some quite big differences in the deployment between teams and what's been optimized over the course of the lap. So I think we just didn't quite have that right, but it should be a relatively easy fix.”