Here's the thing about Friday running at the United States Grand Prix: the timesheet lied, but the drivers were telling the truth. Lando Norris finished FP2 all the way down in P7 with a massive gulf of 1.082s from the pacesetting Ferrari, while teammate Oscar Piastri sat right behind in P8 with just a 0.014s gap. Both papaya machines even lost out to the Racing Bulls of Liam Lawson.
That puts McLaren sitting in a clear fourth place behind the top three teams, where just 0.189s covered Charles Leclerc, Kimi Antonelli, and Max Verstappen at the top. But looking beyond the raw numbers, the Woking squad actually had decent pace hidden away in the MCL40. The disaster wasn't the speed itself; it was wrestling the machine.
"It's difficult," Norris said after the session. "I think the pace is not bad. We seem to step away from Red Bull and Ferrari, probably Mercedes as well. So, we seem a little bit off comparing to them. But the car is just very difficult to drive, like it has been for a long time, too difficult to be able to be consistent and to get a nice feeling consistently. The pace is not bad, it's just very difficult to achieve it."
To unlock speed from the beast, the reigning champion explained that the team has to push right to the absolute limit just to be close. Because the handling leaves no margin for error, putting together a clean, representative lap becomes an insane task.
"Just to get the car to be quick, we're just a step behind," Norris added. "So to get the car to be quick, we have to try so hard to be perfect, and you cannot be perfect. I mean, I'm sure everyone has similar problems in a way, but we're just not quick enough yet easily to be there consistently."
Thankfully, overnight set-up changes could throw them a lifeline. Norris remains optimistic that small tweaks in a few directions can calm the handling down and make the car a lot nicer to drive for the rest of the weekend.
Chief Technical Officer and Chief Designer Rob Marshall shared that confidence, pointing out that the team actually set a purple sector in P2 before a mistake ruined the lap. On top of that, a small package of upgrades focused on revised front and rear corner furniture and the diffuser delivered exactly as intended, providing a measurable benefit that showed up on the stopwatch.
"Yeah, we're very pleased actually," Marshall said. "I wouldn't say it’s a tiny upgrade, but it's really small parts that are kind of almost a bit of tuning, really. But they seemed to deliver quite well, so certainly a measurable benefit, and we think we see it in the stopwatch as well. So yeah, we're quite pleased."
